Tag: King Center

Fahamu Pecou has come back from tragedy to host a solo show at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, Justin Timberlake is coming to State Farm Arena, and Atlanta is celebrating what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.'s 90th birthday.

Ceremony brings together nearly 200 hundred officials, activists, and onlookers for to reflect on the legacy of SNCC's co-founder.

Back in 2012, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn district to its list of the country’s “most endangered” historic places. Much bemoaning of Atlanta’s fondness for the wrecking ball followed—just as it had in 1992, the first time that the Trust sounded the alarm on the precarious status of one of the most influential locations in African American history.

At the national park bearing his name, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a crowd that did not arrive today. There would be no students, no awestruck pilgrims, no laughing children. His voice, and his incomparable “I have a dream” speech, was broadcast from speakers perched above his crypt, which is in the center privately run by his family. King’s words echoed over Auburn Avenue: “Free at last! Free at last!”

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, his youngest child was just five. She had spent little time with her father; he was so often on the road—jailed in Birmingham a few weeks after her birth, addressing 200,000 people on the National Mall when she was five months old, marching from Selma to Montgomery when she was a toddler.