The National Center for Civil and Human Rights stands on land donated by the Coca-Cola Company, a downtown block that had held little more than pavement. It opened in June 2014. Philip Freelon and HOK designed its two curved brick wings to read as arms interlocked, a gesture legible only from the street. That building anchors most routes of the Atlanta Black History & Civil Rights Tour, at 100 Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. Atlanta accumulated the material for such an institution over a century. Auburn Avenue, the corridor known as Sweet Auburn, was wealthy enough that Fortune magazine in 1956 called it the richest Black street in America. Its banks, insurance houses, newspapers and churches formed an economy segregation could not reach. Martin Luther King Jr. was born at 501 Auburn Avenue in 1929 and later co-pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church a short walk from the front door. Morehouse College, Spelman College and the wider Atlanta University Center supplied the organisers, lawyers and student strategists the movement ran on. Any serious Atlanta civil rights landmarks tour crosses this ground because the ground did the work. The collections reflect that inheritance. The Center displays rotating selections from the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, some 13,000 items including sermon drafts on hotel stationery and books annotated in King's own hand. An upper gallery turns from the American South to global human rights, naming prisoners of conscience and campaigns still unresolved. The best-known installation is a lunch counter. Visitors sit, flatten their hands on the surface, put on headphones and hear what a sit-in participant heard. Atlanta Black History & Civil Rights Tour tours generally treat that counter as the centre of the visit, and few people last the full recording. What distinguishes the city is continuity. The King Center, the historic Ebenezer sanctuary and the birth home sit inside a single federal park boundary half a mile east of downtown, while the Center itself faces Pemberton Place. A guided black heritage tour of Atlanta can move from 1929 to 1968 to the present in under two miles of walking. Atlanta Black History & Civil Rights Tour tour routes are short by design: the distances are small, the archive is dense, and most of the buildings are still in use. Congregations still meet, classes still convene, and the record is not sealed behind glass.