A self-guided Sweet Auburn story
Walk the Atlanta neighborhood that shaped Martin Luther King, Jr.—and meet the children, students, congregations, and organizers who carried courage into public life.
Birth Home · NPS / Gary Tarleton
Every movement begins in a place—and with a moment when someone decides to act.
Choose a chapter
Begin with a child learning the boundaries of segregation, then follow the discipline, networks, and collective action that turned local experience into a living movement.
1929
A neighborhood teaches
Family, church, play, Black enterprise, and the daily injustice of Jim Crow all formed the world young Martin observed. The neighborhood offered both shelter and a clear view of the lines drawn around him.
Look closer: What can a childhood block teach us about the adult someone may become?
Place is part of the story
Choose the complete loop or a shorter first look. Select any place to open a story, a detail to notice, an official source, and walking directions.
Before visiting, confirm current access, hours, closures, and ranger programs with the National Park Service.
Opening the neighborhood map…
Every stop and its directions remain available in the place list.
Ranger-led media
Park Superintendent Reginald Chapple leads a room-by-room virtual visit, sharing family routines, games, music lessons, Sunday dinners, and the ordinary life behind an extraordinary public legacy.
Stories of “M.L.,” his siblings Christine and A.D., family game night, the radio in the corner, household chores, and the King-Williams family’s welcoming home.
NPS Birth Home of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Public record · close looking
Contemporary NPS photographs meet Historic American Buildings Survey images. Together they let us read porches, thresholds, rooms, sidewalks, and civic buildings as part of the historical record.
Select an image to look closer. NPS media credited to NPS without a copyright symbol is public domain; HABS images are U.S. government records with no known restrictions.
A visitor’s rhythm
Read the porches, churches, storefronts, gardens, and distance between places.
Hear childhood, faith, organizing, and memory through more than one voice.
Trace how families, institutions, and young people made a movement possible.
Name one act of courage the story asks of the present.
Source trail
Children of Courage