Blue seas ahead

Driving down Joseph E. Boone Boulevard through west Atlanta, it’s hard to imagine that within a mile, close to $2 billion, including hundreds of millions of dollars in public money, have been spent to build a stadium. Once you get past Sunset Avenue, the street where Martin Luther King Jr. lived throughout the 1960s, building after building after building is boarded up and covered in graffiti.The revitalization for this community, promised by Mayor Kasim Reed and Falcons owner Arthur Blank, apparently has not hit this street. Although millions of dollars have been spent on job training, buying up land for affordable housing, and public health, and millions more are pledged, here it looks nearly the same as it did when stadium construction began in May 2014.One building, though, stands out. Approaching the intersection of Joseph E. Lowery and Joseph E. Boone boulevards, you’ll see a huge freshly painted, bright turquoise roof. This is the new Blue Seas Express & Catering restaurant.The restaurant, which opened Aug. 1, is more than just a place to get affordable meals. It’s a partnership between the 10,000 Fearless Men and Women Regional Headquarters of the South and the Atlanta Local Organizing Committee, a coalition of clergy, community, and civil rights leaders. The goal is for Muslims and Christians to work together to create jobs, provide food, and bring positive change to long-overlooked neighborhoods.“Blue Seas is more than a restaurant,” says Rev. Timothy McDonald III, senior pastor of East Atlanta’s First Iconium Baptist Church and ALOC chair, who co-leads Blue Seas with Nation of Islam Student Minister Abdul Sharrieff Muhammad. “It says that Christians and Muslims can work together and that people in the Bluff matter and that they have value. We chose the neighborhood because it was one of the most violent and crime-ridden neighborhoods in Atlanta, according to law enforcement, and we wanted to demonstrate that we could make a difference.”No value assigned“Make sure you get in good,” says Don as I ease my car into Blue Seas’ parking lot one day during lunch hour. Don is a Westside resident employed by the restaurant who helps customers park and protects cars in the lot. He says he is able to work as many hours as he wants. The job helps him out.Inside, a steady stream of customers fills the restaurant’s five tables, dotted around a turquoise-and-white painted dining room. People come and go with the friendliness of a neighborhood cafe. Issues of the Nation of Islam newspaper, the Final Call, are for sale at the cash register. A “Wall of Fame” features dozens of framed photographs of famous Nation of Islam members like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, local Christian leaders such as Rev. Gerald Durley, and everyday people who live in the community. Songs by Michael Jackson and Marvin Gaye play loudly.The cafeteria-style food line offers a variety of vegetables, meat, and fish. Servers pile plates high with squash, cabbage, candy carrots, bean soup, barbecue fish, barbecue chicken, yellow rice, brown rice, and macaroni and cheese. All items on the steam table are $1 each. The menu also includes a veggie Philly sandwich ($3.99) and an eggplant burger ($5.99) alongside more traditional fast-food items such as fries, wings (with “original sauce”), and chicken tenders.For dessert, there’s the well-known bean pie. Famous for being sold at intersections across the country by Nation of Islam members in suits and bow ties, the bean pie’s role in Nation of Islam culture dates back to Elijah Muhammad, their leader for decades, who believed that a diet of navy beans would allow a person to live to be 140.No value assignedLike most items at Blue Seas, the bean pies are produced locally, according to general manager Alicia Muhammad, who says she lived in “the Bluff” for the first 10 years of her life. She describes Blue Seas’ menu as “healthy soul food” and says the restaurant’s goal is to give diners “the most healthy option possible.” For example, she says, they choose to sell cabbage and spinach mixed instead of collard greens, which are hard on the digestive system. And, Alicia says, “pork is absolutely forbidden.”“If you are a person looking for a nutritious meal, this is the place where you will come,” she continues. “You don’t have to worry if we have lard on our gravy or on our chicken. We don’t have any of it.”The restaurant’s specialty is macaroni and cheese. “We call it crack mac,” Alicia says with a laugh, “’cause people come back for it so much.” It comes covered in barbecue-based “Bluff sauce,” which Alicia says fits the neighborhood’s “bittersweet” ethos. “There is tragedy and then there is love,” she says.Blue Seas is about more than just serving food, as shown by the “BUY BLACK” sign painted in bold rainbow letters over a yellow fence beside the parking lot. The restaurant embraces a philosophy designed to make places like Vine City and English Avenue self-sufficient for the people who live there.“If we come together and buy from one another like every other ethnic group that buy from themselves, that’s not racist and I admire them,” Abdul says. “We need to teach our people to do the same, and if we do that, we get that money to stay in our own community and we can fix our own neighborhood up. Crime will go down, and our people will go back to work. We have been put in this position by circumstances; we can come up out of this by doing for ourselves.”No value assignedDown the street from Blue Seas is the 10,000 Fearless Men and Women Headquarters of the South. Abdul says the group’s local members have been involved in patrolling the neighborhood, rehabbing houses, feeding hundreds of hungry residents, providing counseling, and helping veterans get their benefits.“We get a chance to feed them food, and we feed them spiritually without being in a building like a mosque or a church,” Abdul says. “We are doing it right where they are, and we do not condemn them because we understand the condition and the circumstance that they are in. Just because we are in the ’hood don’t mean that the ’hood is in us.”Abdul vows to stand up against the displacement of residents that could result from the investment in the communities and construction of the new stadium. “I understand because Arthur Blank can afford to do it, but to drive our people out of here, nope!” Abdul says. “We are not going to stand for that. We gonna help them to maintain their houses, and we gonna buy houses around here so we will be able to stay.”The group, and the joint effort between ALOC and 10,000 Fearless to open Blue Seas, was inspired by Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, who commanded people at the 2015 Million Man March “to go back to our cities and make our neighborhoods decent places to live,” Abdul says.Farrakhan has been accused of making anti-Semitic and bigoted statements against the LBGTQ community in the past, earning criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. But Abdul says 10,000 Fearless is for all people and that “all I want to do is help the community.” McDonald says he does not agree with everything Farrakhan says but that he concurs with his statements on “black liberation, black males, and black justice.”No value assignedSome residents are cheering the 10,000 Fearless, which has been active in neighborhood associations and philanthropic meetings about how to help the communities, for opening the restaurant.Mother Mamie Moore, president of the English Avenue Civic Association, says a business established by African-Americans in a predominantly African-American neighborhood brings “new hope” to the community and “changes the whole environment on that corner in a positive way.”Atlanta City Councilman Ivory Young says Blue Seas represents an “investment in the community that can’t be anything but transformative and catalytic. The food is good. Word gets out that the food is really good and different and unique and we’re going to see more traffic in that commercial corridor.”Abdul says he wants Blank to come down to the restaurant and meet him. Perhaps he would enjoy the new breakfast menu, which includes two eggs for $1.25.“Show me another restaurant of this magnitude that serves a dollar scoop that everybody can afford,” Abdul says. “A decent meal, a healthy meal for $1. Nowhere. But God is blessing us to do it, and the people are flocking in here, and they love it that somebody cares.”