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COMMUNITY LIFE

CAFE 458

We aspire to be an anti-racist community.

The Community of Hospitality is indebted to Black lives. Black lives deserve justice, agency, security, abundance, and power. Black expressiveness and expansiveness should not require explanation, white permission or white justification.

As a majority-white organization with a history of service in majority-Black spaces and on land stolen from indigenous people, we regret that we have participated in architectures of injustice. We continue to benefit – as individuals and as a community – from systemic racism and white privilege that inflict physical violence, poverty, homelessness, hunger, imprisonment, and spiritual pain disproportionately on our Black neighbors.

Dismantling anti-Black racism and white superiority is both inward and outward work. The remedy is both structural and spiritual.  This work is incumbent upon us as individuals and as a community. We affirm our commitment to racial equity within the Community of Hospitality. We will listen deeply to Black people, indigenous people, and people of color. We will continue to examine our biases and adjust our community culture to better reflect our anti-racist intent. We will modify our governing policies, board membership, programs, and daily practices.

We dedicate this statement to John Lewis, who passed as we wrote this statement, and continues to be a beacon of hope for the world.

BACKGROUND: Squash blossoms photographed in the COH garden in 1986. HEADER: Calligraphy penned by Ann Connor in a 1986 COH newsletter.

In 1987 Café 458 co-founder A.B. Short and Georgia Justice Project founder John Pickens walked the streets, looking for a home for both the restaurant and the Justice Project.

They found an abandoned building directly behind the King Center. After months of volunteer labor, the Café opened in the summer of 1988, with the Justice Project’s office inside. It was the world’s first sit-down, reservation-only restaurant serving people experiencing homelessness.

Two years later, Café staff opened an alcohol and drug recovery program to serve Café guests. In 1996, the Recovery Program moved into a new, adjoining building at 460 Edgewood.

Full-time volunteers staffed the Café and Recovery Program, returning home nightly to live together in the COH house.

For decades, the buildings at 458 and 460 Edgewood provided a relationship-centered, dignity-affirming space for people experiencing homelessness and addiction.

In 2021 – thirty-four years after Café 458 opened – the Community of Hospitality again renovated the buildings at 458 and 460 Edgewood Avenue. COH shares the space with multiple organizations and much of the ground floor of the building is preserved as a collaborative, affordable space accessible to community organizations, educators, and artists working within vulnerable and underrepresented groups.

COH aspires for this historic building to continue to be a space for relationship-based social transformation and healing.

BACKGROUND: 458 Edgewood Avenue photographed in 1987, prior to initial renovations and the opening of Café 458. FOREGROUND: The Café logo as printed on a fundraising envelope in the late 1980s.

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