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A streetcar with bright blue cars pushes through “Auburn Avenue”. The only line of the “Atlanta Streetcar” has just twelve stops. For a good three years now, it has been taking tourists from downtown to “Sweet Auburn”, the historic district in the heart of the southern metropolis, just a stroll from downtown Atlanta. In a kind of open-air museum, a whole series of sights relating to the life and work of Martin Luther King are lined up along the road. They have become a real place of pilgrimage for the American civil rights movement.
Diagonally across from the Martin Luther King Visitor Center is the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. The young Martin Luther King gave his first sermons in the simple church. His father and grandfather were both pastors of the Baptist church. Today the church belongs entirely to the tourists: Years ago the congregation of Ebenezer Church moved into the new building opposite, in the historic church building services are only held on special occasions. A wooden staircase leads up into the church. Recordings from earlier church services boom from a loudspeaker – Martin Luther King’s eloquent sermons in a loop.
A few visitors sit on the simple wooden benches in the nave and listen reverently. 25-year-old Paula, a slender African-American woman with cropped hair, was actually in Atlanta on business and only came to Sweet Auburn for a trip.
The murder of King was the moment of Jeanni’s politicization
She said she was very happy to learn more about Martin Luther King and to hear his words in this historic location. It is a reminder and encouragement for them to stand up for the things that are important to you.
He always stuck to his mission: equal rights and freedom for everyone – even if he knew that he himself would probably not live to see this dream come true.
Just a few steps away from Ebenezer Baptist Church, in the middle of a water basin, stands the marble sarcophagus in which Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta are buried. Next to it, an eternal flame blazes that bravely withstands the pounding spring rain. Jeanni Cyriaque, a small, resolute woman with frizzy gray mottled hair, clings to her brightly patterned umbrella. The 67-year-old is on her way to an appointment in the neighborhood. Despite the uncomfortable weather, she pauses for a brief moment in front of the flickering flame, as always when she comes here.
In 1963 she saw Martin Luther King personally, she says, at an event in her hometown of Chicago. Although she was only 13 at the time, she was deeply moved. The sociologist could actually already be retired, but she simply cannot let go of her mission: to preserve the legacy of the American civil rights movement for posterity. His murder 50 years ago was the moment of their politicization. She was 17 years old at the time and the spokesperson for the senior class at her high school.
The black students at their school decided to wear a black armband over their school uniform as a sign of mourning. The school principal called her into his office and tried to force her to make sure that the students remove their sanitary towels. At that moment she realized that she would become part of the civil rights movement.
She refused – and did not give in when the rector threatened her not to let her give her class’s graduation speech.
Martin Luther King’s birthplace
A few steps further up the street are some stylishly renovated wooden houses, each with the small veranda in front of it, which is so characteristic of southern architecture. The settlement was founded by the descendants of German immigrants at the end of the 19th century. On the right-hand side, next to a historic bookstore, is the number 501: a two-story light yellow wooden house with dark brown shutters. Martin Luther King was born here in 1929.
Ranger Jenkins, a 30-year-old broad-shouldered US Army veteran, volunteers show visitors around the rooms.
The King family lived there until Martin, the middle of three siblings, was 12 years old. At the time, it was just a pretty Queen Anne-style house from the Victorian era – typical of architecture in the USA in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
When Dr. King then became famous, the house became famous too. His descendants have lovingly restored it to the state of the late 1930s with some of the original furnishings. The family’s original piano is in the reception room. Ranger Jenkins spices up the tour with anecdotes from King’s childhood: How he and his brother tried to get rid of the piano teacher with various pranks because they hated her lessons. Reading comics in the bathroom instead of helping with the dishes.
There was an iron rule at dinner: until Father King returned from work in the Ebenezer Church in the evening, the family was not allowed to sit down at the dinner table – even if it was 8 or 9 o’clock.
During Martin Luther King’s lifetime, “Sweet Auburn” was supposedly the wealthiest black neighborhood in the world: the ubiquitous racial segregation forced the small, up-and-coming Afro-American middle class to build their own infrastructure. They set up barbershops, banks, funeral homes; The Atlanta Daily World, the first black daily newspaper in the USA, was created in the building next to Martin Luther King’s birthplace. To this day it is the most widely read newspaper in the region by African Americans. Nightclubs, bars, and cafes along Auburn Avenue also made the neighborhood a cultural hangout for the African American community.
The former flair of a nightlife district
Like the King family, many wealthier blacks moved to Atlanta’s upscale neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s. Sweet Auburn’s decline began.
Today there is not much left of the former flair of a nightlife district. The massive concrete pillars of Interstate 75 cut through the neighborhood. Beyond the expressway, the dreary part of Auburn Avenue begins: empty shops and dilapidated buildings dominate the scene.
The same thing has happened in many US cities, says civil rights expert Jeanni Cyriaque. Whether in the capital Washington or in her hometown of Chicago: expressways have been built everywhere that run through the middle of the Black Quarter.
Yes, it still pains her to see that, says Jeanni. Fortunately, there are many people today who are working to restore the neighborhood to what it was when it was named “Sweet Auburn”.
A few hundred meters further on, on the left-hand side of the rain-soaked street, in an inconspicuous brick house with a red awning, is the APEX Museum.
Dan Moore stoops slightly and speaks in a low voice. He founded the museum in 1978. On a few square meters, the 79-year-old wants to bring history to visitors from all over the world from the perspective of blacks. Today the whole class of a high school is visiting. For Moore, the museum has become a life project. With his museum he wants to provide a more complete picture of Afro-American cultural history: in art, science and architecture. A story that doesn’t just begin with slavery.
Blacks weren’t always just slaves and servants – that’s his central message. It is important to convey this to the children as early as possible. He does not get government funding for this. The APEX museum is financed almost exclusively by entrance fees and a few donations.
Carried away by the revolution
If you’re lucky, you’ll meet Tyrone Brooks, a close friend of Moore – and a companion of Martin Luther King’s. The 72-year-old African American with a bouncy gait was a member of the Georgia State House of Representatives until three years ago. Brooks wears a black pinstripe suit with a red pocket square. His youth was shaped by the television reports about the charismatic leader Martin Luther King: The idol of the civil rights movement was also his great role model.
He and his classmates were swept away by his revolution, he says, and his eyes shine behind the black-rimmed glasses. At the age of just 14 he joined the SCLC, the “Southern Christian Leadership Conference”. In the 1950s and 1960s she was a driving force behind the black civil rights movement. Brooks says he will never forget the day he first met his idol in person. In Worrenton, Georgia – his hometown.
King was on his way to an event in Charleston and stopped over in Worrentan. Brooks, then just under 16 and in an Afro look, set up a picnic with other activists for Martin Luther King and his delegation, with sandwiches and homemade lemonade. When King finally got out of one of the cars – with rolled up sleeves and a loosened tie – he was almost a little disappointed.
They all expected a man of tall stature – but King was rather short and at 31 years of age still looked like a student himself.
There weren’t any cell phones back then, so they couldn’t take selfies with him, he laughs – unfortunately. He wished they had already existed back then – the civil rights movement would have been very active on the Internet as well.
That was the beginning of his apprenticeship as a civil rights activist. He later became a full-time employee of the SCLC. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, the organization lost many active members – but Tyrone Brooks stayed with them to this day. What has changed for the African American population in the US since then?
Effort still needed
Everything has changed, but nothing has changed – this sentence by Martin Luther King still applies.
After all, as a black man he could sit with a white woman in a room on Auburn Avenue today – without fear of being attacked by the Klu Klux clan.
Preserving Sweet Auburn as a historically significant place is important – not as a kind of Disneyland where you can have fun, but where you can learn about the efforts that are still necessary.
US President Donald Trump recently declared the historic district around the birthplace of Martin Luther King a “National Historic Site”. Recognition as a National Heritage Site could attract more visitors to the attractions on Auburn Avenue – and thus to the APEX Museum. But it is much more important to grapple with the meaning of Martin Luther’s concept of nonviolent resistance, says Brooks. Those who want to honor him should not stare at buildings and street names, but get up every day and continue their work.
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