Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park

Along a few blocks of Auburn Avenue in Atlanta stand the places that made Martin Luther King Jr. and the places that now hold his memory: the house where he was born, the church where he and his father preached, and the reflecting pool where he and Coretta Scott King are entombed. Together they trace a life from a Black middle-class Atlanta childhood to the pulpit that helped lead a moral revolution, making this modest district one of the most significant civil rights landscapes in the country.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in a Queen Anne house on Auburn Avenue built in 1895, in the heart of Atlanta's thriving Black business and cultural district known as 'Sweet Auburn.' Two blocks away stood Ebenezer Baptist Church, built in 1886, where King's grandfather and then his father, Martin Luther King Sr., served as pastor. King himself was ordained there and later co-pastored alongside his father.

It was in Ebenezer's pulpit and in the surrounding Auburn Avenue community that King absorbed the traditions of the Black church and refined the oratory that would carry the civil rights movement from Montgomery to Selma to Washington. After his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968, King was returned to Atlanta and buried on the grounds his family and the King Center later developed alongside Ebenezer.

Coretta Scott King founded the King Center adjacent to the church in 1968 to continue his work, and King's crypt sits at the center of a reflecting pool inscribed with words from his 'I Have a Dream' speech. In 1980 Congress established the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, redesignated a National Historical Park in 2018, preserving the birth home, both the historic and new Ebenezer Baptist Church buildings, and the King Center's memorial grounds.