Picture the two-story Victorian at 501 Auburn Avenue on January 15, 1929, the day a boy named Michael King Jr. drew his first breath inside. The house was built in 1895 and was home to the King family during the years that Martin's father, Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., led Ebenezer Baptist Church just a block away. This neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s was one of the most prosperous Black communities in the South, a place where doctors, lawyers, insurance executives, and preachers built careers largely invisible to the white Atlanta that surrounded them.
Young Martin walked these sidewalks to school, played in this yard, absorbed the rhythms of a self-sufficient community under siege from the Jim Crow laws that governed every aspect of his world. The National Park Service now preserves the house as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. Walk slowly here.
The house is not a monument to a famous man — it is a record of an ordinary boyhood in an extraordinary neighborhood, and the ordinary is what makes the extraordinary possible. Continue west to Ebenezer Baptist Church.