The boulevard that now carries his name runs past the front doors of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the building where an Atlanta Civil Rights Tour usually begins, at 100 Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. The address is not incidental. Atlanta drafted much of the movement's paperwork, and it kept the receipts.
The Center opened in June 2014 on Pemberton Place, wedged between the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola at the northern edge of Centennial Olympic Park. Philip Freelon designed it with Antoine Predock. Two curved walls of dark and pale panels sweep toward each other across the lawn and read, from a distance, as arms linked in a march. The scale is deliberately modest. The building yields to the city around it. Atlanta Civil Rights Tour tours radiate outward from this single block.
Those routes take several shapes. An Atlanta civil rights walking tour follows Auburn Avenue through Sweet Auburn, past Ebenezer Baptist Church, Fire Station No. 6 and the King birth home. An Atlanta civil rights bus tour reaches the Atlanta University Center, where Morehouse admitted a fifteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. in 1944 and where students published "An Appeal for Human Rights" in March 1960. An Atlanta civil rights bike tour threads the Eastside Trail toward the same neighborhoods. A serious Atlanta Civil Rights Tour tour treats these addresses as one continuous argument rather than a checklist.
Inside the Center, the material carries the weight. "Rolls Down Like Water" rebuilds a lunch counter with headphones bolted beneath the lip. "Voice to the Voiceless" shows rotating selections from the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection — sermon drafts in ballpoint, margins crowded with revisions and second thoughts. Upstairs, "Spark of Conviction" widens the frame to global human rights, and its wall of faces refuses the comfort of a closed chapter. That refusal is the point. Atlanta preserved its movement geography while the buildings were still in use rather than after they became relics, and the churches, campuses and storefronts on the Atlanta black history and civil rights tour circuit still hold congregations, students and customers. An Atlanta Civil Rights Tour reads, finally, less like sightseeing than like reading a city's unfinished draft.
4 hr
