Visiting Auburn Avenue

Yesterday was the day that we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday. It's a national holiday, but the event it commemorates took place right here in Atlanta, not very far from where I am writing this. But even though I've lived in Atlanta for years, I hadn't visited Dr. King's birthplace until a few months ago. In order to complete the requirements for a Boy Scout Merit Badge, Iain needed to visit a National Historic Site, and this was the one he selected.

We went on a Saturday afternoon, only to learn that the tickets for tours to visit the birthplace were long gone for the day; if we came back in the morning, they said, we could get tickets for tomorrow. So we came back the next day, were first in line, and got tickets for the first tour of the morning.







It's a two story house that didn't go straight from Martin's birthplace to being a National Historic Site, but the home has been restored so that most of the rooms appear much as they did at the time that Dr. King was a child. There's a formal downstairs parlor, where the children practiced piano, his sister's bedroom, his father's office, the dining room, and the kitchen; upstairs, a room the family rented out to boarders, the master bedroom where Dr. King was born, and the room he shared with this brother. All of the King children were born at home; Dr. King's father did not want his children to be born in a segregated hospital.

We were at the end of the tour, standing in the hallway outside of Dr. King's childhood bedroom, when our tour guide, a young African-American woman from the National Park Service, asked if we had any questions. There was a question about Ebenezer Baptist Church, and a couple of questions about the restoration of the house. Then someone on the tour, a middle-aged African-American woman, asked our tour guide if she ever felt Dr. King's presence in the house. It was a question that surprised me; it probably is not a question for which the National Park Service provides a suggested response in its training for tour guides. Our guide didn't need anyone else to tell her what to say. She only paused for a moment before she said that sometimes she does feel something when she's in the house alone, a sensation, she said, that gives her goose bumps.

I don't believe in ghosts and I suspect that our guide didn't either. I do believe that what happened in that house and nearby at Ebenezer Baptist Church made the United States a better country. In his column this weekend in the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote, "When we observe Martin Luther King’s Birthday, we have something very real to celebrate: the civil rights movement was one of America’s finest hours, and it made us a nation truer to its own ideals."

It's our history, and it really matters.