Where MLK Walked
Auburn Avenue and the Privilege of Remembering
A few months ago, I walked through the Atlanta neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up. A trip to Atlanta afforded a day to walk down Auburn Avenue, passing his childhood home from the sidewalk, entering Ebenezer Baptist church, pondering pictures, objects and news articles along a “Freedom Road” exhibition which is now a National Park.
Being there in person felt remarkably different than appreciating quotes on social media, watching documentaries, or even reading books. Like all embodied experiences, there was a certain felt something which can hardly be communicated in typed words, but that I now carry with me as I celebrate the national holiday today.
Perhaps most moving was a room filled with Dr. King’s recorded voice — in the church he co-pastored with his father — sitting in the very pews where parishioners would have first heard him, surely fanning themselves as they sounded their Amens in the Atlanta heat. It wasn’t a particular point his voice was proclaiming that affected me, but more that we could no longer hear him today; that his voice of non-violence was so violently silenced, freezing in time his interpretation of the way forward, leaving us to figure out the next move.
As we exited onto the street, a large Atlanta youth choir was snapping a picture in front of the visitor center across the street, our next stop. Inside, televisions playing old news stories, marches, and sermons were surrounded by students from a high school field trip — some engaged, some chatting, some just munching on lunch, but all born after his life and death. Just like me.
When I first heard about Dr. King in the classes of my Orlando area elementary school — it was all history, just like Vietnam, WWII, Jim Crow era, and even the Civil War. It’s hard as an in-the-moment ten-year-old to understand that the assassination of such a public life just thirteen years prior was still quite relevant; just as something supposedly settled a hundred years prior in the Civil War, was still clawing its way into being.
The visitor’s center was remarkable. We took it all in, pausing here, reading there, and just stopping to take it all in. After an hour or two, it started to sink in that there was no way it all could sink in. It struck me how accustom I had become to choosing when, and when not to, enter into the discussion of racial justice. Once again, I had the privilege of “stepping away” from its realities, and months after this trip, the yearly arrival of MLK Day calls me back to remember.
I have a sort of mental altar formed from this day’s celebration nearly twenty years ago at a small local venue in my town. That day, something broke through, something that hadn’t quite been real to me before: the gift that MLK gave was also for me. We would all be better in an equitable world, giving and receiving the gift of each other. Though his battles were often locally focused (Memphis sanitation workers, Mississippi bus riders, Southern counter diners), the effort’s beneficiaries, and thus the effort’s backers, would go far beyond any one group of people.
Looking back, my embedded “us vs them” mindset was just beginning to loosen, and that work is continuing across many ares of my life, looking for ways to unite our otherwise divided selves, just as the work of Dr. King inspires us to do.
While so many of my touch points with MLK involve sampling him “into my world”, walking through the Sweet Auburn neighborhood of Atlanta finally saw me stepping into his. And today, just one more stop remained across the street. There, the sound of rushing water beckons to a memorial I’d never quite placed geographically: the tombstone for Dr. and Mrs. King, surrounded by flowing water. Placed slightly below a series of fountains, the steps of the waterfall are stamped with the quotation:
We will not be satisfied until Justice Rolls down like water and righteousness like a might stream.
That there was a security guard posted at the tomb of a man who lived and died for a message of non-violence, was an all too present reminder that the work must continue.
Blessings on your celebration and remembrance today, and your service year round.
weekendswell
source of last photo, Markos: npplan.com