Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic Resource Study

Statement of Significance

This study will assess and evaluate the Site's historic resources in relationship to three historic contexts. These contexts correspond closely to historic themes identified by the NPS and the Georgia SHPO. The thematic framework of the NPS is outlined in History and Prehistory in the National Park System and the National Historic Landmark Program. In addition to general historical themes like "Architecture" or "Commerce," the Georgia SHPO has identified twelve distinctive aspects of Georgia history. These aspects are currently undeveloped and have been considered for the following contexts.The following three historic contexts were developed for this nomination:

A. The Development of a Black Community and Leader: Atlanta's Auburn Avenue Neighborhood and Martin Luther King, Jr., 1906-1948

B. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Leadership of the American Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1968

C. Architectural Resources of the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site, ca. 1880-1950

Context A, "The Development of a Black Community and Leader: Atlanta's Auburn Avenue Neighborhood and Martin Luther King, Jr., 1906-1948" relates to the NPS subtheme "Ethnic Communities" of Theme XXX, "American Ways of Life." Context A also relates to two aspects of Georgia history: "Large Black Population and Strong Cultural Presence" and "Conflict and Accommodation in Race Relations." Context A addresses the physical, social, and economic environment in which Martin Luther King, Jr., was reared. The Site embraces only a portion of the Auburn Avenue neighborhood, while the geographical area for this context encompasses an area akin to the Preservation District. Subthemes within this context include urban life, ethnic community growth and isolation, and occupational and class distinctions. The context begins in 1906, the year a bloody race riot signalled increased racial segregation patterns among black and white Atlantans, both residentially and commercially. The context ends in 1948, the year that King left Atlanta to pursue his education at Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania.Context A will briefly summarize the development of the Auburn Avenue black neighborhood. The context then will address the influence of the community on the intellectual and moral development of Martin Luther King, Jr. Throughout the period of significance, Auburn Avenue between Pryor on the west and Randolph on the east was the focus of Atlanta's east-side black community. Many of the churches, businesses, and other institutions of key importance to the Auburn Avenue black community are located outside the boundaries of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Historic Site. Thus, a discussion of these community institutions is essential in establishing this context, but only those historic resources that lie within the historic site will be evaluated in relation to this context. Resources in this context are evaluated at the local and national levels of significance.

Context B, "Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1968" is closely related to the NPS subtheme "Civil Rights Movements" under Theme XXXI, "Social and Humanitarian Movements." Context B relates to the Georgia SHPO contextual theme "Major Theater for Civil Rights Movement." Context B corresponds to the period during which King was a nationally prominent civil rights leader. King's civil rights activity in Atlanta during the period was limited primarily to his involvement with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Ebenezer Baptist Church, local lunch counter sit-ins, and a labor dispute at Scripto, Inc. Events occurring across America, many involving King, are important in establishing this context and will be briefly sketched. The context begins with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott led by the city's religious leaders, including King, and ends with his death in Memphis, Tennessee. Resources in this context are evaluated at the national level of significance.

Context C, "Architectural Resources of the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site, ca. 1880-1950" relates to NPS theme XVI, "Architecture" and to the Georgia SHPO historical theme, "Architecture." [18] Context C addresses buildings possessing local architectural significance recognized under Criteria C. The context commences with the earliest building construction date within the Site. All buildings constructed prior to 1950 were surveyed; however, only in exceptional cases are buildings less than fifty years old eligible under this context. The Site's architectural resources represent residential and commercial buildings common in urban areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Few of these resources exhibit high-style architectural features, but they serve as good examples of local adaptations of popular methods of construction which often incorporate elements of nationally popular architectural styles. Resources in this context are evaluated at the local level of significance.

     1. Context Narrative

During Martin Luther King, Jr.'s youth, Atlanta's Auburn Avenue neighborhood was a vital, largely self-contained black community. [19] A product of segregation, the community included laborers and domestic workers as well as successful professionals and businessmen. King grew up understanding both the limits imposed by segregation and the achievements that blacks accomplished in spite of it. The Auburn Avenue environment helped shape King's mature views on racial harmony and social justice.

The Auburn Avenue community developed against a backdrop of increasingly rigid, legally enforced racial segregation and the effective disfranchisement of blacks throughout the American South in the 1890s and 1900s. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, inconsistency and flux characterized southern race relations. Before 1900, few southern states required segregation in public places. Separation in public activities was common, but local racial protocol varied considerably. In urban areas, limited racial mixing on public carriers, in common areas, and even in work places testified to the fragile foothold that blacks had established in municipalities. The political participation of southern blacks also varied considerably in this period. Beginning in the 1890s, however, southern whites fashioned a strictly segregated public realm and eliminated blacks' civil and political rights. [20] In Atlanta, a 1906 race riot accelerated the development of separate spheres for blacks and whites in the city.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited the denial of the franchise "by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." [21] However, when the protection of federal troops was withdrawn, blacks' voting rights increasingly were restricted through intimidation, restrictive legislation, and discriminatory practices. Whites employed numerous devices to disfranchise blacks without openly flouting the Fifteenth Amendment. Southern governments created all-white primaries, poll taxes, literacy tests, and complicated voting procedures to exclude black voters. Many of these measures also limited the franchise of less affluent whites, in spite of mitigating efforts like "grandfather clauses." Grandfather clauses sheltered illiterate whites by exempting from literacy requirements individuals whose ancestors had voted prior to emancipation. By 1910, nearly all southern states had enacted suffrage laws that prevented most blacks from voting. [22]

In Atlanta, whites limited black political participation as early as 1872. That year the city's Democratic Party adopted the white primary, excluding blacks from this preliminary selection process. [23] Following the decline of the Republican Party in the South, nomination in a Democratic primary usually assured victory in the general election. Although blacks in Georgia were generally excluded from Democratic primaries, their votes were occasionally sought, and often manipulated, in close contests. In the 1890s, the rise of the Populist Party led to increased competition for southern black votes. Georgia disfranchisement policies wavered as Populist and Democrat candidates vied for urban and rural black votes in 1892, 1894, and 1896. Shortly thereafter, Georgia whites, uncomfortable with black political power, especially in close elections, resumed efforts to effectively disfranchise blacks. This was accomplished in an amendment to the state constitution ratified by referendum in 1908. The primary motivation was to prevent blacks from voting in state and national contests. Even after this date, some blacks were able to vote in Atlanta municipal elections. [24]

By 1900, increased efforts to codify segregation practices accompanied disfranchisement measures. The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibited segregation on steamboats, railroad cars, hotels, theaters, and other places of entertainment, but it was rarely enforced In October 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the act's enabling clauses unconstitutional, nullifying its effectiveness. In 1890, the court went further and upheld a Mississippi law mandating "separate but equal" accommodations for black and white railroad passengers. In 1896, the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned the same principle of racial separation in education. Following these rulings, southern states enacted numerous segregation or "Jim Crow" statutes limiting black and white contact in most public places. [25]

Atlanta's Auburn Avenue reflected the changing nature of southern race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As was typical in newer postbellum southern cities, Atlanta blacks were clustered residentially in a number of distinct settlements. Many black neighborhoods were in less desirable low-lying areas or near railroad tracks. However, Atlanta neighborhoods and blocks were less rigidly segregated from 1870 to 1890 than they were after 1900, when Jim Crow was more firmly established. De facto residential segregation existed in the late nineteenth century but was not uniform. After 1900, as Atlanta grew and white hostility increased, the color line became firmly drawn. [26]

Auburn Avenue was opened in 1853 as Wheat Street, named for Augustus M. Wheat, a white merchant. The street runs east from Whitehall Street in downtown Atlanta The Atlanta City Council renamed the street in April 1893 at the request of residents who thought Auburn Avenue sounded more stylish. [27] Between the 1850s and 1906, Auburn Avenue developed primarily as a white residential and business district that included a substantial black minority. [28] From 1884 to 1900, the racial make-up of the area bounded by Old Wheat Street, Howell, Edgewood, and Jackson (now a portion of the Site) remained substantially constant at approximately 55 percent white and 45 percent black. [29] As one study noted:

Interestingly enough, the old Fourth Ward, in which the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site and Preservation District are located, not only had the greatest proportion of blacks in 1896 (46 percent of the ward's population), but the highest degree of integration as well (26 percent [of residences located adjacent to or across from a residence of another race]), a possible indication of the area's appeal to both blacks and whites. [30]

Around 1900, more blacks began to move to the Auburn Avenue neighborhood. This trend accelerated following the bloody September 1906 race riot, during which whites attacked many blacks and black-owned properties in downtown Atlanta and other neighborhoods. A riot relief committee reported that ten blacks and two whites died in the rioting, but contemporary observers put the death toll as high as 100. Black enfranchisement, racial fears, and black economic power were all factors involved in the build-up to the riot. The riot followed a Georgia election for governor in which both candidates, Hoke Smith and Clark Howell, appealed to anti-black sentiment. Both candidates had ties to Atlanta newspapers, which published a series of highly sensationalized accounts of alleged crimes by black males against white women. The month prior to the riot, one thousand delegates to the National Negro Business League convention had met in Atlanta, antagonizing some whites who resented successful blacks. [31]

Subject to increased hostility and rising rents for downtown retail and office space, black businessmen left the central business district and began to concentrate on Auburn Avenue between Courtland and Jackson streets. This area s growing black residential population provided a customer base for these businesses. By 1909 black residences outnumbered white residences along Auburn by 117 to 74, and the section of Auburn Avenue between Courtland Avenue and Jackson Street contained 64 black businesses. Once the Auburn Avenue black business area was established, the number of downtown black business concerns declined sharply. [32]

The Auburn Avenue black community emerged because rigid social and physical segregation denied blacks meaningful roles in white-dominated society. In Atlanta and elsewhere in the urban South, blacks developed and strengthened their own churches, businesses, social and cultural institutions, and social welfare agencies.

Between 1910 and 1930, the Auburn Avenue neighborhood became the center of Atlanta black life. Black Masonic leader John Wesley Dobbs tagged the area "Sweet Auburn," because its churches, homes, and commercial buildings were highly visible emblems of black achievement. The Avenue and its vicinity was the site of influential black businesses, churches, and a diverse black residential community. Businesses concentrated on Auburn west of Jackson, and residences lay east. After 1920, industrial concerns that presumably employed blacks, such as laundries and a pencil factory, located on Houston Street. Housing segregation confined blacks to limited areas in Atlanta, and working-class and middle-class blacks often lived side by side in the Auburn Avenue neighborhood. [33]

Small retail businesses, such as barber shops, cleaners and tailors, groceries, drugstores, and restaurants, shared the Avenue with substantial black-owned banks and insurance companies. The Atlanta Life Insurance Company began as a small mutual aid society founded by members of the Wheat Street Baptist Church in 1904. Purchased by black entrepreneur Alonzo Herndon in 1905 and combined by him with other small mutual aid societies, Atlanta Life became one of the largest black-owned proprietary companies in America. [34]

Auburn Avenue exhibited considerable social class and occupational diversity. From 1910 to 1930, many black teachers, clergymen, physicians, and businessmen lived in the community. The most prestigious addresses were on Auburn Avenue and on Houston Street, known as "Bishops Row," because it was home to several Methodist bishops employed at nearby Morris Brown College. Other prominent Auburn Avenue residents were Bishop Lucius H. Holsey of the Methodist Church, Charles L. Harper, the first principal of Booker T. Washington High School, and the Reverend Peter James Bryant of Wheat Street Baptist Church. [35] Domestic workers, laundresses, carpenters, and laborers also called Auburn Avenue home. Many laborers found employment in the industrial concerns along Houston Street. The neighborhood's housing stock reflected this diversity in employment. Two-story Victorian houses, two-room shotgun cottages, and boarding houses shared Auburn Avenue addresses.

Black churches were the oldest and most important Auburn Avenue institutions. Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal churches dominated black community life, providing spiritual support to their members and meeting places f or many community groups. Numerous social, cultural, and educational institutions and businesses, such as banks and life insurance companies, originated in church benevolent societies. Church leadership conferred great status and autonomy within the black community and often served as a conduit to the white power structure. Ministers led efforts to improve conditions in the community and served on the boards of black colleges, businesses, and social-service institutions. [36] Prominent Auburn Avenue churches included Wheat Street Baptist Church (founded 1870), Bethel AME Church (reorganized in 1865), Butler Street Colored (later Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church (founded 1884), First Congregational Church (founded 1867), and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s church, Ebenezer Baptist Church (founded 1886). [37]

Auburn Avenue boasted an array of organizations devoted to enriching the social, cultural, and social-welfare aspects of black life. These groups included women's clubs, an orphanage and school, social clubs, fraternal orders, libraries, and a YMCA. Large black fraternal orders, like the Odd Fellows, Masons, and Knights of Tabor, added self-help activities to their social and recreational concerns. Members of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows participated in an insurance benefit program and could borrow money from the order to start businesses and purchase property. [38]

The chief rival to Auburn Avenue as a center of black life was the area surrounding the Atlanta University complex on the city's West Side. The site of several black colleges since the 1870s, the West Side in the 1920s began to attract middle-income blacks in search of new homes. Serious overcrowding in the Auburn Avenue neighborhood contributed to the shift to the West Side. By 1950, if not earlier, the West Side had replaced Auburn Avenue as the preferred residential address for relatively affluent blacks, but Auburn Avenue continued as a center of black business activity well into the 1950s. [39]

Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Auburn Avenue Neighborhood

Martin Luther King, Jr., lived within the Site until he was twelve and within the broader Auburn Avenue community until he was eighteen. The close-knit world of Auburn Avenue, with its emphasis on church and family and its pride in black self-reliance and achievement, profoundly influenced King. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in a house at 501 Auburn Avenue (Birth Home) on January 15, 1929. The Reverend Adam Daniel Williams (known as A. D.) of Ebenezer Baptist Church, King's maternal grandfather, had purchased the house in 1909. King's father, Martin Luther King, Sr. (Daddy King), moved to the house in 1926, upon his marriage to Alberta Williams. The King family lived on Auburn Avenue until 1941, when they moved three blocks away to 193 Boulevard, near the intersection of Boulevard and Houston Street. This house, built about 1924 and occupied by a black physician, John W. Burney, from 1925 to 1939, is no longer standing and was located outside the Site's boundaries. [40]

In childhood, King observed blacks succeeding within the constraints of a segregated society. Daddy King's ministry gave the family many contacts with black community leaders. Black clergymen, educators, and businessmen often visited Ebenezer Church and the King home. Yet, the community housed a broad range of residents, and King's neighbors employed shovels and brooms as well as pens and cash registers. This environment exposed King to the richness and poverty of black community life.

From an early age, King resented the limitations segregation imposed on blacks, both within and outside his community. King attended Younge Street and David T. Howard elementary schools, both segregated institutions, and commuted on the backs of buses to Atlanta University Lab School and Morehouse College on the West Side of Atlanta. He received discriminatory treatment at downtown stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. One Georgia bus trip fixed the humiliations of segregation in King's mind forever. The driver ordered King and a high school teacher, returning from an oratorical competition, to give up their seats to whites. King later said he was never angrier than on that day. [41]

King also observed the efforts of his father and others to resist the inferior treatment of blacks. In his autobiographical work, Stride Toward Freedom, King related how his father forcefully objected when a white policeman called Daddy King a boy. On another occasion, the senior King stormed out of a downtown shoe store when asked to step to the rear of the store. King's father and grandfather both worked to register black voters; A. D. Williams's efforts helped defeat Atlanta school bond issues until they provided for a black high school. Daddy King was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and helped lead efforts to equalize the pay of black and white school teachers, to establish Booker T. Washington High School (Atlanta's first public high school for blacks), and to desegregate elevators in the Atlanta courthouse. [42]

As the son and grandson of prominent Baptist ministers, King knew from personal experience the crucial role of the church in southern black life. Just two blocks west on Auburn Avenue, Ebenezer Baptist Church was a second home to young Martin Luther King, Jr. He spent all day Sunday and much of weekday afternoons and evenings at the church. [43] Prominent black clergymen from as far away as Chicago stayed with the Kings when in Atlanta. King's father was active in his church's national organization, the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., serving on its executive board. [44] Ministers had been leaders of the black community from slavery days and would play a leading role in the Civil Rights Movement.

King's background in the black Christian church also helped him to develop a moral basis f or opposing segregation. Christian precepts of community, the redemptive power of suffering, and love for enemies provided the basis for King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance to discriminatory laws and customs. King's theological studies at Crozer Seminary and Boston University built on this early exposure to Christian principles at Ebenezer Baptist. Because of his background, King was able to call upon the images and metaphors familiar to millions of southern black churchgoers to rally support for the Civil Rights Movement. Old Testament themes of exile and eventual deliverance had special meaning for southern blacks, who often saw themselves as internal exiles. Black spirituals and gospel songs became mainstays of the Civil Rights Movement. [45]

The experience of growing up on Auburn Avenue firmly rooted Martin Luther King, Jr., in southern black culture. He learned of the diversity, triumphs, and failures of southern blacks. King used this experience to lead blacks in the struggle against segregation. The black church provided a community model that transcended class and status distinctions. King's youthful experience in the Auburn Avenue community helped shape his vision of a just interracial society.

Significance

The Birth Home is nationally significant under Criterion B (persons) as the birthplace and boyhood home of Martin Luther King, Jr., a nationally recognized civil rights leader. King's own autobiographical writings as well as the written and taped recollections of his father and sister document his childhood in this house. King's national significance as an adult civil rights leader is documented below in Context B. The Birth Home is also locally significant under Criterion A (events) as a component of the larger Auburn Avenue black community.

Ebenezer Baptist Church is nationally significant under Criterion B (persons) as a place where King spent much of his youth and where his mature beliefs and values began to take shape. Ebenezer Baptist Church is an extremely significant link to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s formative years. At Ebenezer, King learned the Christian doctrines that helped form the basis of his nonviolent opposition to racial discrimination. The Civil Rights Movement relied on themes and images common to the southern black Christian experience. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s exposure to southern black religious culture largely occurred at Ebenezer Baptist Church. King's youthful activities at Ebenezer are well documented in his autobiographical writings and in several biographies of King. King's later involvement with Ebenezer Baptist Church as cc-pastor from 1960 to 1968 and the church's role as a site for numerous Civil Rights Movement conferences, meetings, and strategy sessions enhance the national significance of this resource under Criterion A (see Context B below). Ebenezer is also locally significant under Criterion A (events) as an important institution in the Auburn Avenue community.

Other residences within the Site, Fire Station Number Six, and landscape features such as historic sidewalks are contributing resources under Criteria A (events) and B (persons), because they represent the environment in which King grew up. The largely self-contained Auburn Avenue black neighborhood helped form King's character and influenced King's future development as a civil rights leader. The extant Site residences are physical links to the community that existed from 1929 to 1941.

The eligibility of these resources under Criterion C (design/construction) is considered below under Context C.

     2. Criteria Considerations/Integrity

In general, birthplaces are eligible for National Register listing if the person is of outstanding historical importance and other appropriate sites connected with the individual's productive life are not available. For Martin Luther King, Jr., Congress specifically authorized the protection and interpretation of King's birthplace as part of the Site. King is unquestionably of national historical importance as a civil rights leader.

The NPS has restored the interior and exterior of the Birth Home to represent its appearance during King's years of residence. The Birth Home possesses integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. The essential physical features that defined the appearance of the house in 1929-1941 are intact.

Church properties usually are eligible for National Register listing only if their significance derives primarily from architectural or historical importance, independent of the property's religious function. Ebenezer Baptist Church has historical importance in relationship to Context A both as an institution of great importance to the Auburn Avenue black community and as a place where Martin Luther King, Jr., spent much of his youth. King became historically important as a national civil rights leader, not as a pastor. The influences that shaped King's career as a civil rights leader are represented in Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Ebenezer Baptist Church possesses a high degree of integrity. The exterior and interior are substantially as they were from 1929 to 1941. Exterior materials, window and door openings, decorative brick work, and stained glass windows are unchanged. The addition of an education building in 1956 and a minor 1971 addition to the south facade of the church are changes with minor visual impact. The education building has significance under Context B as the site of important events connected with the Civil Rights Movement. Ebenezer Baptist is in current use as a church and is instantly recognizable as such. It possesses integrity of location, design, materials, workmanship, feeling, and setting. It also retains considerable integrity of setting, although surrounding land use has changed somewhat from residential to institutional (King Center and community center).

To qualify as contributing resources, Site residences must have been present during the period (1929-1941) that Martin Luther King, Jr., lived within the Site. Residences on the Birth Block or near enough to it to have been an important part of King's youthful environment are evaluated under this context. Because residences are primarily significant under this context for associative characteristics rather than for design, a considerable degree of alteration or deterioration may be present without defeating eligibility. Much of the housing stock within the Site has deteriorated since 1941, detracting from the integrity of design and workmanship in some cases. Some single-family houses have been converted to multiple occupancy; nonhistoric exterior treatments, such as asphalt siding, have been applied to some structures; and some original architectural details have been removed or replaced. To be eligible as a contributing resource, enough original fabric should remain to permit a residence, after exterior rehabilitation, to adequately represent the appearance of the neighborhood in the 1929-1941 period.

Some residences within the Site are not eligible as contributing resources under this context because they lack integrity. More than 75 percent of the original fabric of 492-494 Auburn had to be replaced, making this structure a reconstruction and therefore ineligible. 18 Howell, which has suffered years of structural and architectural deterioration and a fire, does not retain sufficient integrity to qualify as a contributing resource. In addition, 479-481 Old Wheat Street, through various alterations over the years, has lost most of its distinctive architectural decorative features such as the porch millwork. It also has a concrete porch and has been converted to a single family residence.

     3. Contributing Properties under Context A

Nationally Significant

Ebenezer Baptist Church, 407-413 Auburn Avenue (1914-1922)
Birth Home, 501 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1894)

Contributing to the Site's National Significance

     4. Noncontributing Properties

492-494 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1897), a reconstruction managed as a cultural resource
479-481 Old Wheat Street (1905)

B. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Leadership of the American Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1968.

     1. Context Narrative

This context briefly reviews the origins of the American Civil Rights Movement and provides an overview of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s career as a civil rights leader. The Civil Rights Movement encompassed many desegregation demonstrations and campaigns in diverse locations across the American South. Dr. King participated in many of these campaigns, while residing in Montgomery, Alabama (1954 to 1960), and Atlanta (1960-1968). Atlanta was also the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an important civil rights organization headed by King from 1957 to 1968. The period of significance begins in 1955, when King became the leader of a movement to boycott segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, and ends in 1968, the year of King's death. [46]

American Civil Rights Movement

Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, had worked for decades to secure black civil rights, several factors infused black civil rights campaigns with new vigor and made national politicians more receptive to black demands following 1945. The experience of blacks in World War II, the increasing political power of blacks in northern cities, the willingness of some black ministers to more aggressively attack segregation, and the role of a new communications medium— television—in exposing Americans to the plight of blacks in the segregated South all influenced the postwar racial climate. [47]

As the United States slowly emerged from the Great Depression and prepared for the possibility of war, black leaders lobbied for equitable treatment of blacks in the military and defense industries. In January 1941, A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an important black labor union, pressured the Roosevelt Administration to increase black employment in defense industries. Randolph began preparations for a mass protest march in Washington, D.C., with fifty to one hundred thousand black participants. President Franklin D. Roosevelt avoided the march by issuing Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, banning employment discrimination by defense contractors. Approximately one million blacks served in the armed forces during World War II in segregated units, usually with white officers. But these men enjoyed greater opportunities to train as officers, pilots, and engineers than during previous conflicts. Black veterans returned from the war with broader horizons and enhanced self-confidence to press for full civil rights and an end to segregation. [48]

Legal racial segregation in public places continued after World War II throughout the South, where 70 percent of American blacks lived. In 1944, only 5 percent of black adults in the South were registered voters. The NAACP, led by blacks, spearheaded intensified challenges to segregation and disfranchisement and remained the dominant civil rights organization during the 1940s and 1950s. [49] While the NAACP concentrated on legal challenges through the courts, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial group founded in 1942, experimented with nonviolent sit-ins to protest discriminatory hiring practices at Chicago department stores. CORE, however, never gained a large following among blacks. [50]

The postwar federal courts and Democratic administrations were increasingly sympathetic to black concerns. The Democratic Party was becoming more dependent on black voters in northern cities and included in its ranks outspoken civil rights advocates like former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the all-white primary election, a device commonly employed in the one-party, Democratic South to exclude blacks from the political process. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman appointed a biracial presidential commission that released a report, To Secure These Rights, which called for the elimination of segregation. The President issued an executive order in July 1948 desegregating the armed forces. A civil rights platform plank endorsed at the 1948 Democratic National Convention led to a walk-out by many Southern delegates and the creation of a third-party presidential ticket that carried four southern states. Also in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially restrictive covenants in residential real estate transfers legally unenforceable. The covenants were widely used to prevent the sale of houses to nonwhites. In 1950, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on interstate railroad dining facilities unconstitutional. [51]

In the early 1950s, blacks were gaining political influence in parts of the South. By 1952, 20 percent of eligible southern blacks were registered voters, a fourfold increase over 1944. Blacks were elected to city councils in Winston-Salem (1947) and Greensboro, North Carolina (1951). Most registration gains came in the Upper South rather than in the Deep-South states, where entrenched legal hurdles, frequent and culturally sanctioned intimidation, and violence effectively crippled enfranchisement attempts. [52]

The most important legal defeat for segregation occurred in May 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education—a group of consolidated cases the NAACP had been pursuing for years. The Brown decision greatly encouraged civil rights activists to expand their attacks on other aspects of segregation. It also intensified southern white resistance to integration. [53]

Local desegregation campaigns launched the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Montgomery, Alabama; and Tallahassee, Florida, blacks challenged segregation on city buses. Leadership of the bus boycotts quickly passed from teachers and other professionals to black clergymen. Black ministers, supported financially by their congregations, were less vulnerable to white economic reprisals. Churches also possessed unmatched prestige in the black community and controlled organizational assets. Church auditoriums and classrooms provided space for meetings, and mimeograph machines spread the message for mass actions. [54]

During the Civil Rights Movement, blacks relied less on traditional legal challenges to segregation and more on direct-action protests, often involving hundreds or thousands of demonstrators. Southern blacks in the 1960s protested with boycotts, sit-ins, and marches, risking arrest and beatings from white law-enforcement officers. The press carried news of any violent response by white authorities to a national audience. The new medium of television cast a particularly harsh light on the repressive tactics of southern officials and spurred reform efforts nationally. Civil rights leaders always hoped to extract concessions from local governments, but federal legislation, which tended to be more progressive and broad-based and more likely to be enforced, was usually more effective in accomplishing change. Civil rights campaigns in the 1960s aimed to influence national opinion as much as secure local concessions.

Civil Rights Leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1954, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, hired Martin Luther King, Jr., as its pastor. Following his graduation from Crozer Seminary in 1951, King had worked toward a doctorate in comparative theology at Boston University. While in Boston, he met Alabama-born Coretta Scott, a music student at the New England Conservatory. The two were married on June 18, 1953. In Montgomery, King rapidly established his ministerial authority and expanded the church's existing social welfare program. He formed a social and political action committee, a committee to raise scholarship funds for black college students, and a cultural committee to encourage black artists. King joined the local chapter of the NAACP and the Alabama Council on Human Relations, one of the few interracial groups in the state. Within a year, King was known in the Montgomery black community as an activist and leader. NAACP members elected him to the Montgomery Chapter's Executive Board, and he served as vice president of the Montgomery Chapter of the Alabama Council on Human Relations. [55] In December 1955, Montgomery blacks chose King to lead their protest against segregated buses, beginning his career as a civil rights leader.

Montgomery blacks had long resented city ordinances that required segregation on buses and state laws that authorized drivers to enforce the ordinances. Throughout 1955, E. D. Nixon, a Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters official, and Fred Gray, one of Alabama's few black attorneys, sought a strong test case to challenge the laws On December 1, 1955, Montgomery police arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white providing just such a case. Mrs. Parks, a respected seamstress and secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter, was of unimpeachable character and likely to make an excellent trial witness. Authorities charged Mrs. Parks with a violation of Alabama's segregation laws, but filed no disorderly conduct or other charges, opening the way for a direct challenge to the segregation laws. After her trial and conviction on December 5, 1955, Mrs. Parks agreed to appeal her conviction, thrusting her case into a national spotlight. [56]

E. D. Nixon and teachers from black Alabama State College organized a bus boycott to complement the legal challenge. On December 4, 1955, the first day of the boycott, Montgomery black leaders met to plan an evening mass meeting. In attendance were Nixon, Rufus Lewis, a funeral director and Nixon's rival for leadership of the black community, and a number of ministers including King and Ralph David Abernathy, pastor of First Baptist Church. The group created the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to coordinate the boycott and negotiate with the bus company. Lewis made a motion to name King president of the association, and he was elected without opposition. [57] In leading the MIA, King insisted on nonviolent protest, based on the principles of civil disobedience—many articulated by Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi. Participants in the boycott were instructed on how to respond nonviolently to verbal and physical attacks. The Montgomery black community successfully maintained the boycott for more than one year. When Mrs. Parks's appeal became mired in the state courts, the MIA filed suit in federal court to overturn the state and local bus segregation laws. In November 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Alabama and Montgomery bus segregation laws unconstitutional. [58]

King's boycott leadership propelled him to national prominence as a civil rights leader. From 1955 until his assassination in 1968, King led or provided strong support to numerous campaigns and demonstrations for equal rights throughout the South. Many of these efforts were coordinated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an activist organization of Southern black clergymen King helped establish in 1957. [59]

The SCLC evolved from informal meetings and strategy sessions held by Southern black ministers concerning the Montgomery boycott. Ministers who attended the meetings included King, the Reverend C. K. Steele, who had helped lead the Tallahassee bus boycott, and the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, Alabama, who had founded the Alabama Christian Movement when the state effectively shut down the Alabama chapter of the NAACP. In December 1956, at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, King, Shuttlesworth, Steele, the Reverend Theodore Jemison of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery of Mobile, Alabama, J. H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, and others held a week-long "Institute on Nonviolent Social Change." [60]

Encouraged by the interaction at these meetings and in response to suggestions from Bayard Rustin, a veteran pacifist organizer from New York, King, Shuttlesworth, and Steele issued invitations for an organizational meeting of the "Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration" held at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on January 10 and 11, 1957. Approximately sixty southern black ministers attended the organizational meeting, and, at a subsequent meeting in February, King was elected president. In August 1957 the group changed its name to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. [61]

Overshadowing other groups such as CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the SCLC became "the sustaining mechanism of the Civil Rights Movement." [62] The SCLC sought to coordinate and raise funds, mostly from Northern sources, for local civil rights protests across the south and to develop and train black leaders. Emphasizing its roots in the church, the SCLC insisted on a commitment to nonviolence in all its endeavors. The SCLC was a loosely structured organization, with a fluctuating contingent of headquarters staff and field organizers. Black Baptist ministers dominated the organization's governing board and executive staff. To avoid direct competition with the NAACP, the SCLC did not accept individual memberships, but worked through local, dues-paying affiliates, most of which were black church groups. [63] Locally anchored, independently financed, and committed to a program of nonviolence, the SCLC proved effective after some initial faltering.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was the dominant personality within the SCLC. His national prestige, moving oratory, and experience with both southern black culture and northern intellectual circles made a uniquely successful combination. King moved easily between a rally at a rural black Baptist church in Alabama and a fund-raising dinner in New York City. Many staff and board members contributed to the SCLC's success, but during King's life, the SCLC was synonymous with him. [64]

The SCLC initially concentrated on local voter registration drives in the South, without significant success. Understaffed, chronically short of funds, and without a clear strategic direction, the SCLC achieved little in its first two years. In 1959 the group's executive board urgently requested that King "seriously consider diving the maximum of his time and energies" to the organization's work. [65] In response to this plea, King resigned his pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1960 and moved permanently to Atlanta. The King family—Martin, Coretta, and their two children, Yolanda and Martin Luther King III, moved into a small rented house on Johnson Avenue in Atlanta, near Ebenezer Baptist Church, but outside the current boundaries of the national historic site. The Kings later purchased a larger house on the city's west side, where King resided at the time of his death. While in Atlanta, the Kings had two more children, Dexter and Bernice. From 1960 to 1968, King devoted most of his energies to the SCLC and co-pastored with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church, traveling much of the time. [66]

With King firmly in command, the SCLC figured prominently in many of the important civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. Local groups frequently called on King and the SCLC for counsel. In February 1960, college students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College staged sit-in protests at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Within six weeks, the sit-ins spread to dozens of cities across the South. In April, two hundred black college students met at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The SCLC helped underwrite the meetings, which King attended as an advisor and speaker. The SNCC avoided a formal alliance with the SCLC, but established its headquarters in Atlanta and officially recognized King as a permanent advisor. [67]

Following King's move to Atlanta, student leaders repeatedly urged him to join their efforts to desegregate local restaurants and stores. In October 1960, King participated in a desegregation protest at Rich's Department Store in downtown Atlanta. Atlanta police arrested King and thirty-five others on trespassing charges for refusing to leave the store's whites-only restaurant. Following this arrest, Georgia Judge J. Oscar Mitchell revoked King's probation on an existing charge of driving without a valid driver's license and sentenced him to four months at hard labor. Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy telephoned King's wife Coretta to express his concern, also hoping to draw support from black voters. Kennedy's brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, called Judge Mitchell, who then released King on bond. Upon his release, King addressed a rally at Ebenezer Baptist Church. He expressed his gratitude and esteem for Senator Kennedy, and Daddy King openly endorsed Kennedy's candidacy. [68] Although King made no formal endorsement, the Kennedy campaign publicized the two telephone calls to the black community nationwide, and Kennedy received 70 percent of the black vote in the November election. [69]

In May 1961, CORE began a series of Freedom Rides, attempting to enforce the desegregation of southern bus terminals ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1960. At every southern bus stop, the riders attempted to use the whites-only facilities and to receive service at lunch counters. After a group of riders was brutally beaten by mobs in Alabama, King on May 20 addressed a rally in Montgomery, vowing to support a nonviolent campaign against the entire system of segregation in Alabama. A few days later, King presided at a meeting at Ebenezer Baptist Church where representatives of the SCLC, CORE, SNCC, and others formed the temporary Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee to coordinate support for the Freedom Riders. In late May, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to draft regulations outlawing segregation in interstate bus facilities. [70]

In the summer of 1961, SNCC began organizing segregation protests in the southwest Georgia city of Albany, forming a coalition called the Albany Movement. In December 1961, with hundreds of protesters in jail and no money for lawyers, the Albany Movement requested King's help. Throughout the first half of 1962, protests coordinated by the SCLC, SNCC, and the local chapter of the NAACP continued in Albany. King participated in several demonstrations and spent time in jail. Albany's white leadership ordered mass arrests, which were accomplished without violence. Lacking brutal local opposition that aroused press interest and racked by internal divisions, the Albany Movement failed to gain any concessions on desegregation. The Albany experience was valuable. In subsequent campaigns, King and the SCLC attempted to operate where the black community was unified and where violent white response was likely to attract national attention. [71]

The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMR), an affiliate of SCLC in Birmingham, began an effort to desegregate downtown stores in 1962. Blacks organized a boycott of stores to force negotiations. In December 1962, ACMR leader Fred Shuttlesworth persuaded King and the SCLC to agree to organize and lead a mass action campaign in Birmingham. During mass protest marches, Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor unleashed fire hoses and police dogs on the youthful marchers. These tactics elicited widespread negative reaction when shown on national television. In May 1963, the city's white merchants agreed to desegregate fitting rooms, restrooms, and lunch counters and promised to improve black employment opportunities in stores. [72]

Capitalizing on the success of the Birmingham campaign, the SCLC joined forces with A. Philip Randolph, the NAACP, and other groups to organize a massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. An immediate goal of the march was the passage of a civil rights bill that the Kennedy Administration had sent to Congress. Broader goals encompassed the elimination of all legal segregation and increased job opportunities for blacks. Labor leaders like United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther and prominent white religious leaders supported the effort. The march drew two hundred thousand participants and brought national attention to the civil rights struggle. The demonstration concluded with a rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" address, an impassioned plea for racial justice. [73]

President Kennedy's civil rights bill was stalled in Congress when he was assassinated in November 1963. Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, strengthened the bill's provisions and engineered its passage in the summer of 1964. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial discrimination in most public accommodations, banned employment discrimination, created the Equal Opportunity Commission, and denied federal funds to any activity where discrimination was practiced. King attended the bill's signing ceremonies in Washington in July 1964. [74]

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, King's international reputation grew. The NAACP bestowed it highest award, the Spingarn Medal, on King in 1957. By 1964, he had published Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) and Strength to Love (1963), a book of sermons. In January 1964, Time magazine named him its "Man of the Year" for 1963. In December 1964, King traveled to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for his nonviolent civil rights work. [75]

King's growing international stature did not preclude his involvement with local issues. In late 1964, King and SCLC participated in an Atlanta labor dispute that affected blacks living on the East Side. At issue was alleged racial discrimination by Scripto, Inc., a manufacturer of pencils, pens, and cigarette lighters. Founded in Atlanta in 1923, Scripto in 1931 built a manufacturing plant at 423 Houston Street, within the current Site boundaries. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Scripto expanded its operations, adding plant buildings between Houston and Irwin and constructing offices and research facilities at 150 and 160 Boulevard. By 1964, Scripto employed 950 workers. Some 633 of Scripto's 836 production and maintenance workers were black women. Many were residents of nearby residential areas. [76]

On November 27, 1964, Local 754 of the International Chemical Workers Union called a strike alleging that Scripto's offer of a 4 percent raise to skilled workers and a 2 percent raise to unskilled workers was discriminatory. The union considered the offer unfair, because it believed Scripto refused to promote blacks to skilled positions. Only six of Scripto's 700 black employees were categorized as skilled workers. On November 30, Dr. King informed Scripto that the SCLC supported the strikers and threatened to lead a nationwide boycott of Scripto products if the strike remained unsettled. [77] The company countered that the issues were entirely economic, not racial. King was scheduled to address a rally of strikers at Mt. Zion Second Baptist Church on December 1, but flew to Washington to meet with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover instead. The Reverend C. T. Vivian of SCLC substituted for King at the rally. [78]

A day after his return to Atlanta from the Nobel ceremonies in Oslo, King walked the picket line at Scripto for 30 minutes on December 19, 1964. [79] According to newspaper accounts, King walked the line with 15 others, including a representative from the union's international headquarters in Amsterdam. On Sunday, December 20, King addressed a rally attended by 250 striking Scripto employees at Ebenezer Baptist Church. King announced that the SCLC was proceeding with plans to implement a boycott of Scripto products. On December 24, union leaders and SCLC abandoned the boycott when Scripto agreed to pay Christmas bonuses to all employees. An agreement in principle between Scripto and the union appears to have been reached at this point, and newspaper accounts do not mention any strike-related activity by SCLC or King after December 24. Scripto and the union officially announced a strike settlement on January 9, 1965. The basis of the settlement was an across-the-board wage increase to all categories of employees. The Scripto plant remained in operation on Houston Street until December 1977, when operations moved to Gwinnett County. [80]

While the Scripto strike unfolded, King was planning a major civil rights campaign for Alabama. Throughout 1964, the SCLC and SNCC had been working independently to register voters in various Alabama counties. A coalition including the SCLC and SNCC concentrated its 1965 efforts in Selma, Alabama, where segregationist Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark led the resistance. Large-scale demonstrations and mass arrests in Selma began in January and continued into March. King and other leaders planned a march from Selma to Montgomery for March 7 1965 designed to draw attention to the refusal to register black voters. When the marchers reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the east side of Selma, state troopers and "possemen," deputized by Sheriff Clark, charged into the demonstrators, beating them with billy clubs and firing tear gas. Graphic national television coverage of the incident sparked widespread outrage. [81]

The repression of the Selma march brought growing numbers of supportive northern white clergymen and labor leaders to the city and increased pressure on President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to protect voting rights. On Monday evening, March 15, President Johnson appeared before Congress and a national television audience to introduce legislation that would send federal agents to the South to oversee voter registration. Protected by federalized National Guard troops and a court order, King led a march from Selma to Montgomery March 21 through March 25, which ended with a rally on the steps of the Alabama state capitol. The voting rights legislation was enacted in early August, with King attending signing ceremonies at the Capitol in Washington. [82]

Following the successful voting rights bill campaign, King and the SCLC increasingly turned their attention to the broader problems of poverty and unemployment, particularly in northern city slums. The SCLC continued its voter registration and leadership training work in the South but also mounted a major effort in Chicago in 1965-66. The SCLC joined a coalition of local groups called the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations to attack housing and employment discrimination, inferior public schools, and exploitive ghetto merchants. King moved to a Chicago slum apartment on a part-time basis to draw attention to ghetto conditions. King, SCLC staff, and local leaders led open-housing marches into all-white neighborhoods, frequently encountering hostile crowds. Confronting complex social and economic forces rather than legal segregation, the Chicago campaign had difficulty defining coherent goals. Movement leaders negotiated an agreement with city officials and real estate professionals on a limited number of housing issues, but implementation of the accord was slow. The narrow scope and vague wording of the agreement drew criticism from some commentators and civil rights leaders outside of the SCLC. [83]

Increasingly in the last two years of his life, King moved beyond attacks on segregation to focus on broader issues of economic justice and U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. In April 1966, the SCLC board approved a resolution condemning U.S. policy in Vietnam and urging serious consideration of a prompt withdrawal of forces. [84] King continued to speak out against the war in 1967 and 1968. In the fall of 1967, King and the SCLC began planning a "Poor People's Campaign" to dramatize the issue of poverty in America. For the first time, the SCLC attempted to create a national movement, rather than joining a preexisting local movement. The SCLC hoped to bring together blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and poor whites in the campaign. The SCLC's plans called for three caravans of the poor to march on Washington, D.C. from Mississippi, Milwaukee, and Boston in the spring of 1968. Once in Washington, the demonstrators would establish a temporary tent city to keep the problems of the poor before Congress and the nation. The SCLC hoped to influence Congress to pass legislation assuring full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and increased funding for public housing. King contemplated disrupting traffic and city services if orderly marches and demonstrations failed to move Congress. [85]

King's willingness to consider more aggressive forms of nonviolent protest reflected a growing controversy among blacks over the continued viability of the philosophy of nonviolence. As early as 1966, SNCC's Stokely Carmichael began to articulate a "Black Power" stance that emphasized gaining power for blacks by any means necessary. Frustrated by the slow progress of civil rights reforms and the perceived passivity of King's nonviolent approach in the face of white violence against blacks, many younger blacks embraced Black Power in the late 1960s. By 1968, leaders like Carmichael and H. Rap Brown openly scorned nonviolence and challenged King's leadership of the Civil Rights Movement. Adding to the national controversy over nonviolence were the riots in urban black ghettos that began in the Watts section of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 and continued in Chicago in 1966, Detroit and Newark in 1967, and dozens of other cities. Increasingly in 1967 and 1968, King was attempting to guide a movement deeply divided over philosophy and tactics. [86]

In early 1968, King was devoting much of his time to recruiting for the Poor People's Campaign, when the Reverend James Lawson of Memphis, Tennessee, asked him to support a strike of black sanitation workers in that city. The sanitation workers had walked out in February 1968, because city officials refused to recognize their nearly all-black local of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The Community on the Move for Equality (COME) organization was formed to support the strikers. King was largely unaware of divisions within the Memphis black community between established clergy and NAACP officials and young Black Power adherents. On March 18, King addressed a rally of fifteen thousand strikers and supporters in Memphis. Ten days later, King led a march that turned violent. A small minority of demonstrators began looting, and police attacked both looters and peaceful demonstrators. Deeply alarmed by the eruption of violence, King vowed to return to Memphis and conduct a wholly peaceful march to vindicate his nonviolent beliefs. [87]

King arrived in Memphis on Wednesday, April 3, 1968, for talks with participants in a new march scheduled for Monday, April 8. Aides described King as depressed as a result of the violence that marked the previous march and the difficulties the SCLC was experiencing recruiting for the Poor People's Campaign. On Wednesday evening King addressed a small rally at the Memphis Mason Temple. The next evening, April 4, 1968, King was assassinated while standing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel. Blacks and whites alike reacted with sorrow and anger to King's murder. Rioting in 110 American cities left thirty-nine dead in the days following King's death. [88] Escaped convict James Earl Ray was tried and convicted of murdering King, although the question of whether Ray acted alone is still debated. The Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy succeeded King as president of the SCLC. Abernathy went ahead with the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, but failed to accomplish the campaign's goals. [89]

King's body was flown to Atlanta, where it lay in state at Sisters Chapel of Spelman College. On April 9, 1968, Ralph Abernathy, who had been with King since the Montgomery bus boycott days, conducted his funeral service at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Prominent civil rights leaders, black entertainers and professional athletes, and the four leading presidential contenders—Senator Eugene McCarthy, Senator Robert Kennedy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon—attended the service. A crowd exceeding sixty thousand listened to the service over loudspeakers outside, and as many as fifty thousand joined in the funeral cortege from Ebenezer to the campus of Morehouse College. King's casket was borne on a farm cart drawn by two mules, symbolic of the Poor People's Campaign. At Morehouse, college president emeritus Benjamin Mays gave a brief eulogy before King was buried next to his grandparents at South View Cemetery. [90]

King's widow, Coretta Scott King, founded the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in order to carry on her husband's work and honor his memory. She purchased property on Auburn Avenue east of Ebenezer Baptist Church f or this purpose. King's remains were moved to a commemorative site at the Center in 1971. The King Center complex was completed in 1981 and includes King's marble tomb and surrounding plaza, a library and archive, conference center, and exhibit areas. [91]

Significance

Most of the civil rights campaigns led by Martin Luther King, Jr., occurred outside Atlanta. Atlanta, however, was the headquarters of the SCLC, which King led from 1957 until his death, and King's home and base of operations from 1960 to 1968. During that period, King co-pastored at Ebenezer Baptist Church, participated in desegregation protests in the fall of 1960, and supported the 1964 strike at Scripto, Inc. Except for a brief period when they were in an office building at 43 Exchange Place in downtown Atlanta, SCLC offices have been on Auburn Avenue, first at 208 Auburn and currently at 334 Auburn in the Prince Hall Masonic Temple building, outside the Site but within the Preservation District. [92]

Ebenezer Baptist Church is closely associated with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership of the American Civil Rights Movement. From 1955 to 1960, Martin Luther King, Sr., was Ebenezer's pastor, but his son, Martin Luther King, Jr., preached occasional guest sermons. From 1960 to April 1968, King, Jr., served as co-pastor of Ebenezer, usually preaching one or two sermons a month and performing pastoral duties. As Dr. King's national and international reputation grew, his sermons and speeches, which articulated his views on civil rights and other national issues, received increased attention from the press.

The SCLC was founded at meetings held at Ebenezer Baptist Church in January 1957. From 1957 to 1968, the church was the site of numerous SCLC executive staff and governing board meetings, as well as the 1967 SCLC annual convention. Ebenezer's large education building was especially useful for SCLC meetings. King attended an SCLC executive staff meeting at Ebenezer on March 30, 1968, less than a week before his death. Ebenezer's auditorium was used for rallies and mass meetings concerning local civil rights issues. On December 20, 1964, King addressed a meeting of striking black Scripto employees at Ebenezer. [93]

Ebenezer Baptist Church also symbolizes the crucial role of black ministers and black churches in the Civil Rights Movement. Black clergymen were prominent leaders of the movement and the dominant force behind the SCLC. Most affiliate members of SCLC were black church groups across the South. In almost all southern communities where civil rights campaigns were launched, black churches served as meeting places and command posts. [94] The Civil Rights Movement drew on the idealism, prestige, and organizational strengths of the southern black church. The participation of black ministers and congregations gave the Civil Rights Movement a mass base not present in earlier civil rights efforts. Before the 1950s, black lawyers, teachers, and other professionals had spearheaded attacks on segregation. The church drew members from across class lines and provided the numbers needed for effective mass action. Ebenezer Baptist is a physical reminder of the role black churches and ministers played in achieving for blacks the right to vote and ending racial segregation in public places in America.

The Scripto buildings along Houston Street are not eligible under this context. King and SCLC supported the striking black workers in 1964, but King's involvement on the picket line at the plant was minimal, amounting to 30 minutes on a single day at an undetermined location. The oldest portion of the Scripto complex at 423 Houston (built 1931) was likely not the focus of picketing activities, which seemed to center on a plant entrance on Irwin Street. King indicated his strike support most forcefully at a rally at Ebenezer and in his efforts to organize a boycott of Scripto products. Because of the rally, Ebenezer, a nationally significant resource under this context, is a resource that better represents King's role in the Scripto strike than the surviving plant buildings.

Ebenezer Baptist Church is locally significant under Criterion C (see Context C below).

     2. Criteria Considerations/Integrity

Ebenezer Baptist Church is a religious property and eligible for the National Register only if its primary significance derives from its architectural, artistic, or historical importance. Its listing is clearly justified by its historic importance in connection with the Civil Rights Movement and the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Although religious leaders figured prominently in the movement, they focused their efforts on political and social change.

A property significant for historical associations under Criteria A and B must retain the essential physical characteristics that defined its appearance during its association with the historic person or events. Ebenezer Baptist Church possesses integrity of location, design, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. The church also possesses substantial integrity of setting, although land use in the immediately surrounding area changed after 1968, with the construction of the King Center and a community center. The church is still used by the same congregation that built the structure The exterior materials of the church, stucco and brick, are original. The addition to the chancel at the south end of the church, completed in 1970, has little visual impact and is not visible from Auburn Avenue. A new facade, erected in 1971, altered the appearance of the education building, but the building retains the same functions.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s remains were moved to the King Center on Auburn Avenue in 1971. King's marble tomb was constructed in 1976, and the surrounding King Center complex was completed in 1981. Although the grave site falls outside of the period of significance for this context, the 1980 legislation that established the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site included the place "where he is buried" among the resources to be protected and interpreted for future generations. [95]

King's national importance, the clear Congressional intent to include the existing grave site, and the grave site's contribution to the commemorative purpose of the Site make it a nationally significant resource eligible under National Register Criterion B. [96] These factors also satisfy the requirements of Criteria Consideration C, which ordinarily excludes graves from eligibility. Although the grave site is less than fifty years old, it is of exceptional importance and therefore meets the standard of Criteria Consideration G, which governs properties that have achieved significance within the last fifty years. The grave site retains all aspects of integrity.

     3. Contributing Properties under Context B

Nationally Significant

Ebenezer Baptist Church (1914-1922, 1956)
Martin Luther King, Jr., Grave Site (1976)

    4. Noncontributing Properties

C. Architectural Resources of the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site, ca. 1880-1950

    1. Context Narrative

The following context demonstrates the diversity of style and type within the Site and how architectural resources and their settings convey historical meaning. The residential resources that dominate Auburn Avenue and the commercial structures along Edgewood Avenue each illustrate different patterns of urban growth, yet they share characteristics with other urban communities which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The residential resources incorporate elements of identifiable national architectural styles, such as Italianate, Queen Anne, and Craftsman, which are applied to vernacular house types. The commercial and public resources apply elements of the Italianate, Romanesque Revival, Moderne, and International styles to nineteenth and early twentieth century brick commercial buildings. Regional influences also are evident, especially in form. Shotgun houses and gabled ells predominate. Porches constitute the largest common regional denominator. Most of the Site's resources are vernacular in character. They adapt stylistic elements to suit economy and decoration, and they are traditionally massed.

In this context, the buildings within the Site are evaluated for significance in the area of architecture. No buildings within the Site have national significance under Criterion C, but many have local architectural significance. In general, the residential resources on Auburn Avenue illustrate the staged growth of the community and are visible evidence of its changing population. These resources retain a high degree of integrity, although their material condition varies considerably. The resources on Edgewood Avenue are more problematic because structural deterioration or destruction and modern intrusions have altered the corridor's historic fabric. However, the dominant historic commercial development of Edgewood Avenue is obvious, and most remaining buildings retain integrity.

Residential Architectural Resources

The architectural resources of the Auburn Avenue portion of the Site (which includes adjoining portions of Boulevard, Hogue, and Howell streets) are predominantly residential. The following discussion of the residential buildings of Auburn Avenue is organized chronologically. Site resources will be related to broader currents in American architecture from 1880 to 1950.

The two primary analytical categories for discussing American houses are styles and types. The concept of architectural style is a notoriously slippery one, embracing both the decorative treatment and the overall configuration or form of a house. Ornament is usually the clearest indicator of style, with form a secondary aspect. For example, the Italianate style is defined in terms of decoration (an elaborate cornice, heavy brackets, and molded window hoods), proportions (tall, narrow windows and doors), and typical forms (low-pitched roof, overhanging eaves, and towers). Stylistic analysis emphasizes successive style periods, bounded by approximate beginning and ending dates. The concept of style is most useful in discussing the unique designs of professional architects for affluent clients, representing perhaps 5 percent of American buildings. These are referred to as "high style" examples. The remaining 95 percent of buildings are usually classified as vernacular architecture.

House types, rather than styles, are the usual analytical categories applied to vernacular architecture. House types are identified on the basis of ground plan (e.g., square, rectangle, L-shape), number of stories, and roof configuration (e.g., hip, gable). An example of a house type is the gable front and wing house, or L-shaped house, defined by its L-shaped ground plan and cross-gable roof. The amount of ornament found on vernacular houses varies considerably. Examples of vernacular building types that incorporate ornament are widely viewed as borrowing these elements from high style architecture. Thus, a vernacular L-shaped house may have a cornice and brackets associated with the Italianate style.

Many terms describing house styles and types have gained nearly universal currency and will be used in this study. Auburn Avenue residences combine traditional massing (i.e., rectangular, L-shaped, square, or complex) common to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and elements of popular national architectural styles. At times, a house embodies both the massing and the decoration of a period and style. But most commonly, the houses along the Birth-Home Block are vernacular houses with various levels of stylistic decoration. Some Site resources, such as the double shotgun cottages, are best analyzed in terms of house type since their decorative elements are not rigidly defined by a dominant style. Other resources, such as the two-story houses on the Birth-Home Block, represent traditional Queen Anne massing and decorative elements. Most Birth-Home Block resources are not the works of an individual architect, and thus, they are typical of residential architecture in early twentieth century American cities.

Single-Family Residences--Italianate

The large single-family house at 521 Auburn, built in the 1880s and subsequently divided into apartments, is a Georgian cottage type (square massed) with Italianate stylistic details. The oldest extant Site building, the house was constructed on a large lot at a time when much of the surrounding land was undeveloped.

The Italianate style was popular for residences from approximately 1840 to 1880, with its greatest acceptance coming after 1860. The style originated in England in the early nineteenth century as part of the enthusiasm for the Picturesque. Devotees of the Picturesque rejected formality and classical symmetry and sought inspiration from exotic sources. Informal, asymmetrical Italian farmhouses were the inspiration for the Italianate and Italian villa styles in England and America. The architectural pattern books of Andrew Jackson Downing, first published in the 1840s and reprinted into the 1880s, helped popularize the Italianate style in America. The Italianate style combines both symmetrical and asymmetrical L- or T-shape plans and a tall tower. Builders soon applied Italianate details to traditional rectangular American house forms. [97]

Italianate houses typically had low-pitched roofs with broad overhanging eaves; elaborately molded cornices with heavy, often paired, brackets; tall, narrow windows, commonly with round or segmental arch heads; and frequently elaborate window crowns. Paired windows were common, and porches were almost always present, sometimes with ornate carved and turned balusters and posts. Examples of the style are not abundant in the South because the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the depression of the 1870s limited building activity in the region during the style's period of greatest popularity. [98]

The house at 521 Auburn Avenue exhibits Italianate decorative elements applied to a traditional vernacular house type. The Georgian cottage type has a long history in the South and is characterized by a square or nearly square plan, a central hall with two rooms on either side, exterior symmetry, and a height not exceeding one and one-half stories. [99] 521 Auburn Avenue does not display the asymmetry and two- to three-story height often associated with the Italianate style. Italianate features on the house include a molded cornice with heavy brackets, projecting bays at the sides with similar cornices and brackets, and hooded windows. The use of Italianate features on a house built when Auburn Avenue was semi-rural in character recalls the ultimate origins of the style in the farmhouses of the Italian countryside.

521 Auburn is set back farther from the street on a larger lot than its later neighbors. The front yard is dominated by two oak trees and is bordered by a hedge and a fence. The historic concrete front walk has distinct detailing that includes a diagonal scoring pattern and rolled curb-edge detail along the length of the walk. At the front northeast corner of the lot, behind the sidewalk, is a plain, rectangular frame building, constructed about 1920, that was operated by blacks as a soda fountain and cafe in the 1930s and may have had other commercial uses. [100] As the only extent store building within the residential portion of the Site, this structure is an important reminder of the diverse character of Auburn Avenue during the period of Dr. King's residence.

     Queen Anne

As Atlanta outgrew its pedestrian limits in the 1890s, large, two-story houses were constructed on Auburn Avenue. Most of these single-family houses, including the Birth Home and its neighbors, incorporated features associated with the Queen Anne style. Queen Anne is a stylistic term that incorporates decorative elements and house typology. A defining characteristic of the style is complex massing and multiple roof forms. Other Site houses from the 1890s are examples of vernacular gable front and gable-front-and-wing houses (gabled ell) with Queen Anne style decorative elements.

The Queen Anne style was popular nationally from approximately 1880 to 1910. The style originated in the 1860s and 1870s with the English designs of Richard Norman Shaw, W. Eden Nesfield, and others. These architects revived late medieval and early Renaissance forms and materials, such as half-timbering, casement windows, elaborate brick chimney pots, gable-end barge boards, and ceramic tile cladding of exterior walls, and used them in novel combinations. Henry Hobson Richardson's 1874 Watts Sherman House in Newport, Rhode Island, generally considered the first American example of the Queen Anne style, incorporated many of these features. The influential designs of Shaw and Richardson were expansive and manorial, but the vast majority of American Queen Anne houses were modest wooden structures built for the middle class. [101]

American Queen Anne houses achieved dramatic visual effects through the use of contrasting textures, colors, shapes, and materials. Characteristics are irregular, asymmetrical plans; hipped roofs with lower cross gables; projecting features such as bays, turrets, and gable overhangs; elaborate wooden millwork; and the use of textured decorative shingles on exterior walls. Porches were nearly universal and often wrapped around one or both sides of a house. Queen Anne house plans were usually asymmetrical, with an off-center entry and an informal arrangement of rooms. Builders' pattern books helped popularize the style nationally, and railroad transportation made available the mass-produced wooden ornament typical of the style. [102]

     Birth Home

The Birth Home at 501 Auburn, built circa 1894 for a white family named Holbrook and restored by the NPS, is a good example of a two-story middle-class house incorporating Queen Anne elements. In plan, the house is an elongated rectangle with shallow projections on all four sides. The principal roof is hipped, with gable roofs over the projections. The asymmetrical facade is dominated by a front-facing gable and a one-story, full-width porch that wraps partly around the west side of the structure. The porch has turned posts, scrollwork brackets, and a simple openwork balustrade. Paired double-hung windows with louvered shutters are present at the first and second floors under the gable end, which contains a rectangular vent and is bordered below by a pent roof. To the right of the entrance is a circular window. At the second floor, above the entrance, is a small porch with a shed roof. The porch was originally accessed by a door, which was converted to a double-hung window before 1929. The house has weatherboard siding, with decorative shingles in the gable ends. [103]

The Birth Home is set on a typically long and narrow urban lot forty feet wide and 195 feet deep. The house is set back thirty-eight feet from the front lot line and is reached by a walkway of octagonal payers. A concrete block retaining wall, approximately two feet high, separates the elevated front yard from the sidewalk. A privet hedge, approximately three feet high, is planted on top of the wall and encloses the front yard. The east side yard of the Birth Home shares a driveway with 503 Auburn Avenue. A shed, which no longer exists, sat on the east side of the back yard and was converted to a garage by the King family when they bought a car. Other back yard features no longer extant include a vegetable garden on the east, [104] another small shed behind the garden, which served as a coal shed, and wire clotheslines that ran from the house to the shed, supported in the middle with sticks, and from the west corner of the house to the fence. The entire back yard was enclosed by an unpainted board fence, with irregularly spaced boards. The west side yard was extremely narrow. Only a remnant of the low wall, which filled the narrow space between the Birth Home and 497 Auburn Avenue, exists.

The Birth Home's main entrance opens on a small foyer that extends into a sidehall running the length of the house. On the east side of the hall (to the left as one enters) from front to back are a parlor, study, dining room, and kitchen. On the west side of the hall are stairs to the second floor and the basement and a bedroom and bath at the back. The second floor hall extends the length of the building, with three bedrooms on the east and one on the west.

     Birth-Home Block

Most houses on the Birth-Home Block built in the 1890s exhibit Queen Anne features. Like the Birth Home, the two-story Harper house at 535 Auburn Avenue has a hipped principal roof and a front-facing gable projection. The gable end projects over a three-sided cutaway bay, with decorative sawn brackets in the overhangs. A porch with turned posts and a stick frieze runs across the front of the house. Other Queen Anne variations represented at the Site include two front-facing gables (518 Auburn Avenue), jigsawn wall panels (503 Auburn Avenue), and decorative trusswork in the gable end (514 Auburn Avenue). These houses demonstrate the visual variety achieved through combinations of mass produced ornament in this period.

Distinctive landscape features associated with the Queen Anne houses include concrete front walks (518 Auburn Avenue), rear and side-yard walls of mixed rubble materials (510, 514, and 522 Auburn Avenue) and side-yard retaining walls to hold the grade of the front yard even with Auburn Avenue (526 and 530 Auburn Avenue). Granite steps with a thin marble cheek-wall treatment, dating from before 1915, are extant at the sidewalk of 503 Auburn Avenue. An early ornamental iron fence remains around the front and side yards of 530 Auburn Avenue. One of the last rear yard outbuildings/garages within the Site survives at 497 Auburn Avenue.

Several Site houses, built between 1890 and 1910, are vernacular types with limited decoration. These include a gable-front-and-wing house at 546 Auburn Avenue, a T-plan, side-gabled house with a hip roof rear portion at 540 Auburn Avenue, and gable-front houses at 24 and 28 Howell Street. Decoration on these houses is limited to the porches that exhibit turned or chamfered posts, brackets, and balustrades.

After 1900, few large single-family homes were built in the Auburn Avenue neighborhood. Middle-class blacks moved into existing single-family houses, and new construction for working-class blacks was limited to duplexes or small apartment buildings. Many duplexes were double shotgun houses, a common southern vernacular type. Twelve double shotgun houses are located within the Site.

Multiple-Family Residences--Shotguns

Appearing in New Orleans as early as the 1830s, the shotgun house was diffused throughout the South, at first along river trade routes and later in other areas. The type's greatest popularity came between 1880 and 1920 when it was a common choice for mill housing and for speculative developments marketed to working-class whites and blacks. The origins of the type have been debated by historians, some of whom have argued that slaves brought the type from West Africa to Haiti and then to New Orleans. Others have suggested that it originated when the traditional hall and parlor plan was turned sideways to accommodate narrow urban lots. [105]

The defining characteristic of the shotgun type is a plan one room wide and two or three rooms deep. The name derives from this arrangement of rooms opening directly into one another. A shotgun blast fired through the front door supposedly would travel through the house and exit at the back without hitting a wall. The long, narrow configuration of the house made the type a good fit for narrow-frontage urban lots. Shotguns are one-story houses with a door and window on the front elevation and a hip or gable roof. Shotguns commonly exhibit engaged or attached front porches, typically gabled or shed. The chimneys are usually central. Many shotguns lack stylistic features, since they are utilitarian in nature, but some examples incorporate decorative millwork. The double shotgun house is a four-bay, duplex version consisting of two shotgun-plan flats under one roof, joined by a party wall. The porches, chimney placement, and entry location vary among double shotguns, which first appeared in New Orleans around 1850 and spread throughout the South. [106]

In 1905, the Empire State Investment Company purchased the western portion of the block bounded by Auburn Avenue, Boulevard, and Old Wheat Street and constructed nine double shotgun houses there. Built as speculative rental housing for whites, the double shotguns were all black-occupied by 1910. [107] As built, these double shotguns had hip roofs, weatherboard siding, and opposing, hipped front porches for each unit. Ornament was limited to turned posts and sawn brackets on the porches. Many single and double shotgun houses are located within the Preservation District, an area bounded by Old Wheat Street, Boulevard, Irwin Street, and Randolph Street. The shotgun houses within the Site and the Preservation District vary in ornamentation, roof type, number of rooms, and type of porches, but they all served as inexpensive, multiple-family dwellings for working-class blacks.

Landscape features historically associated with the double shotguns were swept (dirt) yards. No extant examples of this feature are found in the neighborhood. Paved and unpaved alleys and their associated inf ill structures were once common in the area; the alley and three double shotgun residences at 493 Auburn Avenue, rear, are the only surviving examples within the Site.

     Apartments

In the 1920s and 1930s, a number of the single-family houses on Auburn were converted to apartments or rooming houses. Small apartment buildings were also constructed in this period. Three small apartment buildings, constructed between 1911 and 1933, are located at 491-493 Auburn Avenue, 506 Auburn Avenue, and 54 Howell Street. All are plain, two-story, rectangular structures with two-story porches, weatherboard siding, and hip or gable roofs. Built for working-class blacks, these buildings are utilitarian and largely unornamented. The flats in these buildings are generally small; those on the first floor have access directly from the porch, while central stair halls provide access to upper floors. These buildings probably offered shared bathrooms when built. The 1931 apartment building at 54 Howell Street has exposed rafters and triangular braces in the gable ends, features often associated with the Craftsman style, popular from approximately 1905 to 1930.

Commercial and Institutional Architectural Resources

The extant architectural resources of Edgewood Avenue are composed of one- and two-story commercial and light industrial buildings. Although much has been lost, surviving buildings represent two major periods of construction: 1905 to 1915 and 1939 to 1955. In total, there are twenty-nine buildings on Edgewood between Jackson and Howell streets, with sixteen constructed during this earlier period and six built during the latter period. The remaining thirteen were either constructed between these periods or followed the 1939-1955 period.

     Commercial Buildings

The development of Edgewood Avenue as a commercial corridor at the beginning of this century is reflected in the late Victorian buildings which line the avenue. These were utilitarian buildings fashioned primarily in the Italianate style of architecture, similar to those constructed throughout the country at the turn of the century. Characteristics of this style include storefronts marked by broad expanses of glass and framed by columns or piers, round- and segmental-arched windows, horizontal stringcourses, flat rooflines, and projecting cornices. Exuberant ornamentation, such as an elaborately shaped pediment with finials, moldings and classical motifs, is commonly found on more prominent buildings or buildings located within the central business district.

Employing such decorative elements provided a means of distinguishing one's building from the surrounding urban fabric. The main facade, which is the point of contact between patron and product, was often used to create an image or advertisement that would lure customers to the merchandise within. Signs were utilized to great effect and included hanging and projecting signs, awning and rooftop signs and signs painted on glass windows, doors and transoms as well as walls. Danneman's Supermarket at 464-468 Edgewood Avenue and 467 Edgewood contain the Site's finest examples of painted wall signs. Danneman's, constructed as a market in 1909, has a multicolored sign on the two-story west facade which depicts a loaf of bread and reads "Reach for Southern Goodness." The two-story rectangular block at 467 Edgewood was constructed ca. 1910 and contains white painted wall signs on most street-facing expanses of brick. "BROWN HAYS" and "DEPARTMENT STORE" are painted on the north facade with "BROWN HAYS COMPANY," "DEPARTMENT STORE," and "PARK YOUR CAR HERE/AND TAKE YOUR TIME" on the larger east elevation.

Signs such as these were common to the Edgewood Avenue commercial corridor, which during the early part of the twentieth century was largely composed of one- and two-story, rectangular brick buildings, considerably less exotic than their more high-style downtown counterparts. [108] Flat and shed roofs were concealed behind parapets with rear and side walls laid in common bond. These rear and side walls included irregularly placed sash windows and were left unadorned. Walls were built to the property line in order to maximize the interior square footage or selling space. This led to the construction of buildings directly adjacent to one another and, by 1911, a continuous row of storefronts existed on the south side of Edgewood, between Boulevard and Daniel Street. By 1928, this row of storefronts extended west to Fitzgerald Street. [109]

Storefronts of one-story buildings include large plate-glass display windows at ground level with a central, sometimes recessed, entrance composed of double wood-and-glass doors and a multiple-light transom. This arrangement is framed with plain brick piers and capped with a parapet that features a stamped metal cornice or decorative brickwork. 482 Edgewood, for example, is a one-story commercial building that was constructed in 1908 and used by a shoemaker, auto repair company, poultry company, and radio and television repair company. The main facade is essentially all glass and includes a central entrance flanked by four plate glass windows which are topped by a band of nine fixed lights. Decorative elements consist of a stamped metal cornice, a corbeled brick cornice, and a recessed brick panel that contains decorative brickwork.

The primary facades of two-story commercial buildings are more complex as these buildings often serve more than one function. The larger facades of these buildings also offer greater surface area to develop a decorative scheme. The symmetrical plate-glass display windows and recessed entrances are similar to those of the one-story commercial buildings, though access to the second floor, which usually contained living quarters, is placed between the storefront and a side pier. The second floors are distinguished from the first floors with stamped metal cornices and feature double and triple windows set within segmental or flat brick arches. Decorative brickwork is found throughout the upper facade and cornice. There are seven extant commercial buildings on Edgewood Avenue, dating from 1905 to 1915, which were constructed as duplexes. One was designed to house three businesses.

485 Edgewood Avenue, built by B. D. Watkins in 1908, is part of a row that spans four buildings from 483 to 493 Edgewood Avenue. This two-story, rectangular brick building exhibits many elements characteristic of early commercial architecture on Edgewood Avenue. The facade is essentially symmetrical with the recessed store entrance flanked by display windows, a second floor entrance placed to one side, and a prominent cornice capping the storefront. The second floor is punctuated with three double windows that are accented with rusticated stone sills and flat brick arches. The corbeled brick cornice is typical of the modest decorative schemes found on smaller buildings outside the city's central business district.

487-489 Edgewood, built by B. D. Watkins in 1909, is a duplex that exhibits an exterior organization similar to that of 485 Edgewood. The storefronts, in fact, are nearly identical, although the second level of each unit is composed of two triple windows and the brickwork on the upper facade and cornice is more elaborate. The Roane Building of 1906, at 537-541 Edgewood Avenue, is the Site's most richly decorated commercial building. The main facade of the second story is composed of two planes and is organized around a three-part, basket-arched window. Flanking sash windows are capped with flat brick arches and terra-cotta finials and egg-and-dart hoods. The uppermost part of the facade contains terra-cotta rondels in the upper corners that feature cornucopia and floral motifs, a corbeled upper facade, and the name and date of the building.

476-480 Edgewood Avenue, built by W. H. Roane in 1909, is the only building in the Site designed to house three businesses. All three stores front Edgewood, with the most prized retail space occupying the corner, fronting both Edgewood and Boulevard. This entrance is angled into the corner, which provides optimum street exposure and shelter from the overhanging upper story. The storefronts of 478 and 480 are designed, like others in the area, with large display windows flanking entrances and a stamped metal cornice above. The second story contains two double windows with round heads. These are set within a larger brick arch which features corbeled brick details and an oversize keystone. The upper facade is marked by a horizontal brick panel, corbeled brick brackets, and a rusticated stone cornice that lines the parapet.

The Edgewood Avenue commercial buildings constructed between 1939 and 1955 either lack the integrity to be considered eligible for listing or do not meet the fifty-year eligibility requirement. Ivie's Garage, 438-442 Edgewood Avenue, constructed in 1939, is the only Edgewood Avenue property that meets both the integrity and age criteria. Two properties, at 458 and 510 Edgewood Avenue, although slightly less than fifty years old, are exceptional local examples of styles and are thus eligible.

     Public and Ecclesiastical Buildings

The Site contains a limited number of public and ecclesiastical buildings that date to the period of significance Several historic structures have recently become public buildings associated with the administration of the Site, such as the Visitor Center at 522 Auburn Avenue. Other buildings, such as the Baptist Memorial Institute School, a school for black children located on the south side of Auburn Avenue at the east end of the Birth-Home Block, have been razed. Those buildings that survive include Atlanta Fire Station Number Six, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, and Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Fire Station Number Six is a two-story Romanesque Revival style building erected in 1894 at 37-39 Boulevard. It is one in a series of neighborhood station houses constructed from approximately 1890 to 1920. These are two-story, rectangular brick buildings with a shed roof and decorative parapet. Similar to commercial buildings of this period, side and rear walls are generally left plain with most of the decorative elements found on the main facade. At the first floor level, these facades are marked by pedestrian entrances, windows, and one or two arched engine bays. Second-story sash windows are grouped together above the engine bays. The Romanesque Revival and Italianate styles of architecture are often combined through elaborate brickwork that includes pilasters, corbels, panels, and door and window surrounds.

The Romanesque Revival design of Station Number Six is suggested by the wide brick arches which frame the single engine bay and the band of five arched, second-story windows above. This style is further characterized by the asymmetrically placed tower, which includes a date panel, and the machicolated cornice. The diaper-patterned frieze, found on both the Boulevard and Auburn Avenue elevations, is the most inventive example of the elaborate brickwork found throughout the building.

At 29 Boulevard, just south of the fire station, is a three-story building constructed in 1912 to house a Catholic Church and School. It was built under the leadership of Father Ignatius Lissner and was intended to serve the surrounding black community. The ground floor was designed as a church, the second floor housed the school, and the third floor contained the auditorium. Worship services are now conducted in a nonhistoric structure at 19 Boulevard. [110]

Our Lady of Lourdes is a plain, hip-roofed building faced with stone at the first floor level and displaying English bond brickwork on the floors above. The exterior ornamentation is largely associated with the brick lintels and corbeled surrounds of the windows. The two- and three-part jalousie windows are probably not original. The first-floor sash windows feature flat stone arches.

Ebenezer Baptist Church, located at 407-413 Auburn Avenue, is part of a tradition of church building that existed in the Sweet Auburn community in the first decades of the twentieth century. Big Bethel A.M.E. Church of 1904 and 1924, located at 220 Auburn Avenue, Wheat Street Baptist Church of 1920-1923, located at 365 Auburn Avenue, and Ebenezer of 1914-1922, are substantial buildings erected by a prosperous black community and built in the popular styles of their day. That these buildings soar above Auburn Avenue suggests both their spiritual importance and their place in the early twentieth century Sweet Auburn skyline.

Ebenezer was designed in the Gothic Revival style of architecture. Popular in the United States as a residential style from 1840-1880, Gothic Revival remained a common choice for ecclesiastical buildings well into the twentieth century. Although Gothic forms never completely disappeared in English church architecture, Gothic reemerged as a style of architecture during the middle of the eighteenth century with the work of William Kent and Horace Walpole. [111] Nearly a century later, it was promoted in the United States by Alexander Jackson Davis. Its popularity increased, however, through the work of Andrew Jackson Downing, whose pattern books, Cottage Residences, Rural Architecture and Landscape Gardening of 1842 and The Architecture of Country Houses of 1850, circulated widely. [112] Lyndhurst, the Tarrytown, New York residence designed by Davis in 1838 and 1865, and Richard Upjohn's Trinity Church in New York City of 1839-1846 are among the most influential buildings of the period and include such elements as pointed-arched window openings, wall buttresses, towers, castellated parapets, and steeply pitched roofs. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Upjohn's archeological approach to church design gave way to more eclectic church buildings. Later Gothic Revival churches include both traditional Gothic design elements, elements borrowed from other styles, and original motifs.

Ebenezer is a two-story, rectangular brick church with two large towers at each end of the Auburn Avenue facade. These towers flank a steeply pitched gable roof that contains two pairs of cross gables. The southernmost pair corresponds to a transept and contains a large, three-part Gothic window in each gable end. The brickwork at the lower level is covered with gray stucco and scored to resemble stone.

The main facade is essentially divided into three bays. The towers, which comprise the two outer bays, are buttressed at the first and second levels and contain stained glass and louvered lancet windows. Merlons are located in the corners of the tower parapets. The center bay contains the main entrance at ground level, three narrow, stained-glass windows at the second level, and a three-part Gothic window in the gable end.

Two-story buttresses divide the side elevations into nine bays, with the tower comprising the northernmost bay and the chancel expressed in the southernmost bay. These bays are punctuated at the lower level by segmental-arched windows with the second-floor bays marked by tall, stained-glass windows. Brick panels mark the division between the first and second floors.

The rear elevation has been largely obscured by a one-story, hip-roofed addition built in 1971. An oculus, located high in the gable end, remains visible. The two-story Education Building, constructed in 1956 and rehabilitated in 1971, similarly obscures the east elevation. Brick beltcourses, panels, corbels, and window hoods ornament the front and side elevations of Ebenezer and to a lesser extent the Education Building. Brick ornamentation of this type is common in public and commercial buildings throughout the Sweet Auburn community from the early part of the twentieth century through the 1930s.

The church auditorium is located at the second level, above the below-grade meeting hall. It is an open, rectangular space, with the pulpit and choir elevated on a platform and a balcony across the rear of the sanctuary. The walls are white plaster, and the pitched ceiling is pressed metal, also painted white. The gently sloped floor is oak and contains a central and two narrower side ranks of pews. Transepts feature stained glass portraits of Rev. A. D. Williams and Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr.

     2. Criteria Considerations/Integrity

Site building evaluations are based on the degree to which they either embody the pattern of features that defines each building type described in the Context C narrative or represent an individual variation within the broader type. Integrity is a key component in the evaluations of eligibility. All buildings possess integrity of location since no buildings within the Site have been moved. Integrity of setting varies from property to property, depending on the alteration of the immediate landscape. However, on the whole, the Birth-Home block and the Edgewood Avenue corridor maintain a high degree of setting integrity since the historic streetscapes and residential landscapes are intact. Few modern intrusions are present. Lists of contributing and noncontributing properties appear below. Buildings determined noncontributing because of a lack of integrity and two buildings that are exceptions to the usual fifty-year requirement are discussed in this section.

A number of Site properties are not eligible because they have lost integrity. A fire severely damaged 18 Howell Street, leaving gaping holes in the walls and destroying its integrity. The duplex at 479-481 Old Wheat, which has been converted to a single-family residence and has a wholly reconstructed porch, also lacks sufficient integrity. The duplex at 492-494 Edgewood is not eligible because virtually all of its historic fabric was replaced in a reconstruction. Under the criteria consideration governing reconstructed properties, a reconstruction is eligible only if it is accurately executed, the building is presented as part of a restoration master plan, and no other building with the same associations survives. Because numerous other residential properties on the Birth-Home block carry the same associative values, 492-494 Edgewood is ineligible.

The facade ornamentation and storefronts are the primary architectural features of the commercial buildings on Edgewood Avenue. Where facades and storefronts have been substantially altered, integrity no longer exists. Alterations to 462 Edgewood Avenue have left little trace of the original storefront, making the building noneligible. The filling station at 479 Edgewood is not eligible because it has lost its canopy and other architectural details. The original storefront of 484 Edgewood has been replaced by a contemporary glass and metal facade, making the building not eligible. This is also the case with 513 Edgewood, where a remodeling has left no trace of the original facade and fenestration.

Two Site properties are eligible although they do not meet the fifty-year requirement, because they are of exceptional importance for local architecture as defined under Criteria Consideration G. 458 Edgewood, built in 1946, is an exceptional example of the Art Moderne style, rarely used for commercial buildings in Atlanta. Additionally, the building is an early example of a drive-up business. The building retains its round windows, canopy with metal coping, and streamlined appearance. 510 Edgewood Avenue (1947) is an outstanding early Atlanta example of International style architecture. International style elements include ribbon windows, horizontal lines, and a composition of simple rectangular masses. These two buildings fail to meet the fifty-year rule by four and five years, respectively, and are eligible because they are exceptional examples of styles uncommon in Atlanta.

     3. Contributing Properties under Context C^*

Residential Buildings

Georgian Cottage with Italianate Elements

521 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1886)
52l-1/2 Auburn Avenue, store building (ca. 1920)

Double Shotgun Houses

472-474 Auburn Avenue (1905)
476-478 Auburn Avenue (1905)
480-482 Auburn Avenue (1905)
484-486 Auburn Avenue (1905)
488 Auburn Avenue (1905)
53-55 Boulevard (1905)
483-485 Old Wheat Street (1905)
487-489 Old Wheat Street (1905)
493 Auburn Avenue, Rear, Units 1-6 (1911)

Single-Family Houses with Queen Anne Elements

497 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1900)
Birth Home, 501 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1894)
503 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1895)
510 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1890) and back yard wall
514 Auburn Avenue (1893) and side yard wall
518 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1893)
522 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1894) and side yard wall
526 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1895)
530 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1895) and side yard wall (ca. 1895-1945)
535 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1895)
550 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1890)

Vernacular Houses and Apartment Buildings

491-493 Auburn Avenue (1911)
506 Auburn Avenue (1933)
515 Auburn Avenue (1909)
540 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1890)
546 Auburn Avenue (ca. 1890)
53 Hogue Street (ca. 1940)
14 Howell Street (ca. 1927)
24 Howell Street (ca. 1895)
28 Howell Street (ca. 1895)
54 Howell Street (ca. 1931)

Commercial Buildings

420 Edgewood Avenue (1912)
438-442 Edgewood Avenue (1939)
439-441 Edgewood Avenue (1920)
443-445 Edgewood Avenue (1909)
444-446 Edgewood Avenue (1909)
447 Edgewood Avenue (1909)
451 Edgewood Avenue (1915)
458 Edgewood Avenue (1946)
464-468 Edgewood Avenue (1909)
467 Edgewood Avenue (1911)
476-480 Edgewood Avenue (1909)
482 Edgewood Avenue (1908)
483 Edgewood Avenue (1908)
485 Edgewood Avenue (1908)
487 Edgewood Avenue (1909)
488 Edgewood Avenue (1909)
489 Edgewood Avenue (1909)
510 Edgewood Avenue (1947)
537-541 Edgewood Avenue (1906)

Public and Ecclesiastical Buildings

Ebenezer Baptist Church, 407-413 Auburn Avenue (1914-1922)
Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, 29 Boulevard (1912)
Atlanta Fire Station Number Six, 37-39 Boulevard (1894)

     4. Noncontributing Properties

449 Auburn Avenue, 2 buildings (1971-1981)
492-494 Auburn Avenue
531 Auburn Avenue, 2 buildings (1954)
19-29 Boulevard (3 buildings)
421-429 Edgewood Avenue (1946)
428 Edgewood Avenue
462 Edgewood Avenue (1927)
479 Edgewood Avenue (1932)
484 Edgewood Avenue (1908)
494 Edgewood Avenue
501 Edgewood Avenue
502-504 Edgewood Avenue
509 Edgewood Avenue
513 Edgewood Avenue (1920)
520 Edgewood Avenue
521 Edgewood Avenue
525 Edgewood Avenue (1948)
528 Edgewood Avenue
536 Edgewood Avenue (1951)
479-481 Old Wheat Street, ca. (1905)