Auburn Avenue: Where King Was Born

On January fifteenth, nineteen twenty-nine, in an upstairs bedroom of a two-story Queen Anne Victorian house at five-oh-one Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Michael King Jr. was born. He would not become Martin Luther King Jr. until his father, the Reverend Michael King Sr., changed both their names to honor the German Protestant reformer during a trip to Europe in nineteen thirty-four. The house itself, a modest but comfortable structure in the heart of Sweet Auburn, had been purchased by the family in nineteen oh nine by the boy's maternal grandfather, the Reverend Adam Daniel Williams.

The block surrounding that birth home had shaped the King family for two generations. Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Williams served as pastor and where Michael King Sr. eventually succeeded him, stood just a few hundred feet away. It was the church where the future civil rights leader was baptized, where he was licensed to preach as a teenager, and where he served as co-pastor alongside his father beginning in nineteen sixty. It was also in Ebenezer's basement meeting rooms in nineteen fifty-seven that a gathering of Black ministers, many of them Ebenezer members, helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that King would lead through the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, and the Selma voting rights movement.

The National Park Service first designated the site a national historic landmark in nineteen seventy-seven and established it as a national historic site in nineteen eighty. In twenty eighteen, thanks to legislation championed by Congressman John Lewis, Congress elevated it to the status of a national historical park, extending park boundaries to protect more of the surrounding Sweet Auburn neighborhood. The park now encompasses about thirty-five acres, including the birth home, the historic Ebenezer church, and King's burial site beside the reflecting pool of the King Center.