Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He was thirty-nine. He had come to stand with sanitation workers whose strike the city wanted to treat as a local nuisance. Born Michael King Jr. in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, he took his father's name, preached at Ebenezer, and kept Atlanta as the movement's home city — not the place he died. Montgomery taught a nation what a boycott could do. Birmingham and Selma taught it the cost. The March on Washington put a speech in the record; the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 did not retire him. He turned next to poverty and to the war in Vietnam, and he was still talking about a Promised Land the night before he died. Coretta Scott King and their four children brought him back to Atlanta. He is buried at the King Center on Auburn Avenue. The crypt sits beside water that does not hurry. The district of his childhood is still a working neighborhood, which is how he would have wanted the memorial to look.