We will integrate arts and culture with nature, celebrating Chattanooga's diverse heritage.
As Chattanooga’s first pro soccer team, CFC was started by Chattanoogans and, today, is partially owned by Chattanoogans, as the organization offered “ownership shares” to roughly 3000 fans in all 50 states. CFC was created to bring football to Chattanooga, using this most beautiful game to unite Chattanooga.
(We know it’s football to ya’ll. Most of us here? We call it soccer. It’s a habit. Can’t apologize. But we're sure sorry about the last World Cup debacle.)
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CFC has immeasurably contributed to our city; its Highland Park soccer fields are a perfect example. Located in the Highland Park neighborhood, with its beautiful abundance of immigrant families, the fields offer sanctuary, community and play.
On any given night, there could be more than 50 countries and nationalities represented, with nearly 10 different languages being spoken. Overhead, there are 27 different flags flying.
The Bend was home to human inhabitants some 10,000 years ago. It witnessed the stone tools, the birth of agriculture more than 2000 years ago, the arrival of conquistadors and the forced removal of the Cherokees.
Preserving the Bend fully and against all non-traditional uses is the high priority of the US National Park Service and many other Chattanoogans.
It is within the spirit of the National Park City that Moccasin Bend retains its identity in the fullest of measures; preserving the park for generations as a place of sacred beauty, ecological depth and historical prominence.
What if we gave land back to its original inhabitants?
What if we renamed parks using Cherokee and Citico vocabulary?
What if we recommitted ourselves to remembering stories too often forgotten?
On the south end of the Walnut St. Bridge, famous for its postcard presence in our downtown renovation, a series of sculptures honors Ed Johnson and the Black attorneys who fought for his life.
In 1906, a lynch mob took Johnson, a Black man, from his jail cell, after he’d been unfairly arrested, and marched him to the nearby Walnut St. bridge, then shot, hung and killed him for allegedly raping a white woman.
He was an innocent man, later exonerated by a 21st-century courtroom. His attorneys, Black men from Chattanooga, were among the first Black attorneys to argue before the US Supreme Court, which issued a stay of execution days before the lynching. The white Chattanooga mob cared not.
Decades later, as Chattanooga reimagined itself and downtown, the Walnut St. bridge remained a place of horror and racist violence in the memory of many Black Chattanoogans, some of whom vowed never to walk the bridge again.Then, a group of citizens began asking a question: What if we attempted to honor Johnson? What if the whole city knew his name and story?
Its undertaking was magnificent and, many believed, impossible: can we form an interracial group that resurrects the story of Ed Johnson to provide healing and reconciliation?
Through dozens of formal and informal meetings, workshops, performances, media appearances and prayerful petitions, the Project formed a community. Artist Jerome Meadows was invited to create a memorial just steps away from the lynching site, unveiled during the Project’s noteworthy weekend event.
"It is rare in these trying times that communities come together to recognize a profound wrong. A wrong that haunts," said Princeton University’s Eddie Glaude at the ceremony.
"Over 100 years later, though it may be, this act to remember Ed Johnson, what happened on that fateful day, helps clear the path for a different way of being together here in Chattanooga."
We have champions across the city: nonprofits, families, public and private leaders, gutsy, DIY individuals who start working, come hell or high water.
ArtsBuild has supported local arts since 1969, with more than $77 million of investment in arts programming, education and organizations.
