Atlanta Looks to Celebrate King’s Legacy at Refreshed Landmarks – Garden & Gun

The man who led the modern civil rights movement and inspired the world with his fight for equality started life in a second story bedroom in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood. 

As his mother struggled through labor, his father was pacing the hall, says Jonathan Eig, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography King: A Life. “A slap on the bottom brought his first cry.”

Visitors to Atlanta will soon be able to visit the birth home when the Martin Luther King Jr. Historical Park reopens the Victorian-era house this summer after an extended closure. “There’s so much history in those halls,” Eig says. “I feel like a time traveler when I step through the door.”

In addition, Atlanta’s National Center for Civil and Human Rights has recently reopened after a $58 million redesign and addition, which includes a re-creation of King’s office during the height of the civil rights movement.

Both the center and the King park expect crowds this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and they remain among Atlanta’s most popular visitor attractions throughout the year. The King birth home, which has been under renovation since 2023, isn’t expected to reopen until June, a park service spokeswoman says, but visitors can still see the exterior of the Queen Anne–style house where King spent the first twelve years of his life, and rangers offer a virtual tour of the house in the historic Fire Station No. 6.

Those visitors will see that King grew up in a prosperous middle-class Black family in the heart of Sweet Auburn. “This is the place that made young Martin Luther think he could be special,” Eig says. The soft-yellow home with a wraparound porch and scroll-cut woodwork trim was purchased by the civil rights leader’s grandparents. It’s decorated with family pictures and period furnishings. In the study, a game of Monopoly, one of King’s favorites, is set in mid-play. There’s also a radio where King listened to his favorite show, The Green Hornet.

“The house itself is big and warm and welcoming,” Eig says. “King felt loved and safe and also inspired in that home to do the kind of community-activist work he saw his parents and neighbors doing.”

Photo: @Gene Phillips

The exterior of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.

The thirty-five-acre park also includes the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was baptized and ordained and served as co-pastor with his father. It’s near the gravesite of King and his wife, Coretta Scott, which is located on the grounds of the adjacent King Center. Both the church and the gravesite are open and, along with the rest of the park, free to visit.

Atlanta visitors can also explore King’s legacy at a new display at the Center for Civil and Human Rights. The downtown site includes a replica office from the period when he ran the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and led the nationwide struggle for civil rights. It’s part of the center’s new rotating exhibit area featuring highlights from the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection. 

The first display, curated by King’s daughter Bernice, includes handwritten drafts of sermons, speeches, and letters. King’s office showcases his books and family photographs and lets guests flip through the reverend’s Rolodex and pick up a phone to hear snippets from conversations with people like Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and Malcolm X.

The museum expansion also includes a wing exploring the failures of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, documenting the racial terror of lynching and the destruction of neighborhoods like Tulsa, Oklahoma’s famed Greenwood, once known as Black Wall Street.

And the center has expanded its immersive exhibit, the Lunch Counter Experience. The multimedia display literally puts headphone-wearing visitors in the seat of protesters as they join a sit-in to desegregate a lunch counter. Participants must keep their hands on the counter as they’re taunted and threatened with violence. It’s a memorable, unsettling exhibit, showing the courage required for social change. 

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