Reflections on the March on Washington at the MLK Site in Atlanta

When you live somewhere, you often take for granted historic landmarks and places of interest right within your vicinity, perhaps because you tell yourself can go there anytime you want.  However, some perfect times to visit these places come only once a year or maybe even once in a lifetime.  Today was the 50th year anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, famous for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech on the footsteps of the Lincoln Memorial.  While the commemoration of the march took place in Washington, DC, I thought it would be fitting to pay a visit to the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site here in Atlanta today.  Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up on Auburn Avenue, a neighborhood close to downtown known as Sweet Auburn.  In the early twentieth century, it was a unique place where Atlanta's black middle class rose to relative prosperity, although short of full equality with whites.  The National Park Service runs the site which spans a portion of Auburn Avenue, including MLK's birthplace and burial location.  I actually have visited the area before several years ago, but I had been wanting to pay a return visit.  I thought today would be the perfect time.

Visiting the MLK is site is free of charge, but perhaps due to lack of federal funding, the complex is showing its age somewhat.  The exhibits are still stirring and interesting.  They adequately display the history of Jim Crow Laws and the Civil Rights Movement and the background of MLK, but the exhibits appear to be showing a good deal of wear and tear.  The site put up a display to commemorate the March on Washington with a number of photographs and exhibits, but it was somewhat limited.  One of the more moving permanent exhibits is the mule-driven cart that carried the body of MLK after his assassination in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.  The rangers who work at the site are full of information and happy to answer questions about MLK and the time in which he lived.  

The Ebenezer Baptist Church, where MLK, his father and maternal grandfather had all served as pastors, held a commemorative service this afternoon in the church's Heritage Sanctuary, the original church building, which recently has been restored to how it looked during the 1960s.  The congregation wore white paper hats similar to those worn at the March on Washington, sang "This Little Light of Mine," and listened to a sermonette, in which the pastor emphasized that America still had a long way to go in achieving racial justice, noting especially the Trayvon Martin case and the Supreme Court's recent case invalidating an important portion of the Voting Rights Act.  A bell choir rang bells in order to "Let Freedom Ring" in conjunction with bell ringing that took place all over the country today at 3 PM.  The most incredibly moving part of the service for me was joining hands with people in the pews around me and singing "We Shall Overcome."  It was truly a spiritual experience.  

After the service, I walked by the eternal flame and tomb of MLK and his wife, Coretta Scott King, which sits in a reflecting pool.   Several persons from news stations or otherwise were set up with video cameras along the edges of the reflecting pool.  I walked back to Auburn Avenue, by Historic Fire Station No. 6, which became Atlanta's first racially integrated fire station and down to the King Birth Home.  I had visited both of those on my previous visit and, as I recall, these are some of the most interesting parts of the site.

Visiting the MLK site today left me with mixed emotions.  The March on Washington and MLK's contribution as leader of the Civil Rights Movement wrought long overdue change in America, the dismantling of segregation through the Civil Rights Act, the right to vote through the Voting Rights Act, a better chance for an African-Americans to live the American dream and ultimately a country that would elect an African-American man to the White House-- twice.  MLK's legacy is deeply important and should be celebrated and remembered.  However, as I drove up Boulevard up to Ponce de Leon Avenue, as many tourists probably do, I witnessed the hopeless poverty that is a cruel reality for too many African-Americans in this country.  While here in Atlanta, whites and blacks are more likely to interact here than they might in other cities, our lives are still somewhat separate and not really equal.  America certainly has come a long way since 1963 but it still has a long way to go to achieving the dream MLK envisioned at the Lincoln Memorial fifty years ago.  As the pastor said at Ebenezer Baptist today: "We may need to take off our dreaming slippers and put on our marching shoes."