Free at last

We took a streetcar to Auburn Avenue in a southern eastern suburb of Atlanta the next day. The streetcars here are relatively new to the city. We were practically the only people on this one. When we asked the Ambassador on board why this was so, he said that the City had just started charging a fare for the streetcar as of the 1st January this year. Why was that? we asked. Because the homeless of Atlanta had been using the shiny new trolleys as warm air-conditioned comfort. In cold winters. Free of charge. Riding them all day. And had 'trashed' the new trolleys, it was reported.

We wondered what Martin Luther King jr would have thought of that move by Council. Martin was a man of the people. A man of the poor. A man in support of justice and fairness for the underprivileged. He lived to uplift. 

We found his birthplace at one of the streetcar stops on Auburn Avenue. At number 501. We hopped off and walked to a smart, very middle class home, where he had lived with his maternal grandparents and his parents until his mid-teens. All around the neighbourhood where he grew up were pleasant shotgun timber cottages, and well built wood framed houses, inhabited by wealthy black Americans who ran banks, share markets, real estate offices, schools and churches in the surrounding streets in the early decades of the twentieth century. A privileged lot they were. Martin wanted for little. He had a very comfortable life. Everything he wanted. 

Until the day he coveted a pair of shoes he saw in an Atlanta store window outside his usual shopping precinct. He begged his father to buy them for him. Into the store they went.  A salesperson was serving white folk in the front of the store when they approached and asked to see the shoes in the window. They were told they would be served if they moved to the seats at the back of the store and waited there until the white folk were served. Martin Luther King jr was stunned into shamed stillness. For the first time in his life. But his father, reaching for his hand, led him gently out of the store. Graciously. 

He, like Martin Luther King junior's maternal grandfather, was a Minister at the Auburn Avenue Ebenezer Baptist Church not two doors down from where Martin lived. Neither of these older members of Martin's family could tolerate such overt signs of racism. From them Martin Luther King jr learned. 

He became so imbued with this philosophy over the following years of study and thinking that he soon dedicated his life to uplifting the lives of black folk, not only those in Atlanta, but all over the United States, the world. He went to India. He studied Gandhi. He completed his doctorate and started his mission with political zeal, wisdom and acumen. His dream was for freedom from injustice for all of his people.

And just as he spied the mountain top, and was relating to his followers what to expect on the other side, he was assassinated. Shot dead on the second floor balcony of the shabby Lorraine Motel overlooking an ugly blacktop square in the heart of Memphis. We made a special visit to this spot on our last trip to the States.  He was buried just a few paces from where he was born. On Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. He lies here in a crypt beside his wife, Coretta, not far from his childhood home, or the church where his grandfather and his father preached, and where he, in fact, gave his own introductory sermon. Three generations of ministers in the one church.

The site of his early home, his neighbourhood, the church where he learned of faith and fairness, and the fire station where he and his young friends played, has now become an important National Park - a special Historic Site. Here he rests along a symbolic Freedom walkway, his tomb raised in the centre of a peaceful blue reflecting pool. With an Eternal Flame burning. In remembrance.

Atlanta Streetcar

Where Martin Luther King jr was born

Where Martin Luther King's childhood friends lived

Firestation #6 - where Martin and his friends played.
 Then it was a white run fire station. After his death it became the first fire station in America to have black fire attendants. 

Interior of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Martin's speeches are spooled here on speakers throughout the day.

Free at last