To love Black history — and if you have followed our Black History Month series over the last 11 years, you know this already — is to understand that it is not just confined to the past.
It lives and breathes, even when you stand in rooms long after the men and women who filled them have gone.
On Tuesday, I stood in one of those rooms — the former Southern Christian Leadership Conference office of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on the first floor of the Prince Hall Masonic Temple and Lodge. This week it was formally announced that the nearly century-old building will become part of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, folded into the nation’s official record.
Atlanta is thick with King’s presence. You can, when the renovations are done, walk into the house where he was born. You can sit in the old Ebenezer pews where his voice once shook the rafters. You can pass his gray suit displayed at the airport lights. You can stand before his crypt to mourn and honor him.
But this was where he labored. Where the sacred work of freedom required simple desks, telephones, paper and ashtrays, along with the long patience of organizing a stubborn, but brilliant, group of men and women who dared to believe that America could be better than it had been.
Ordinary work done under extraordinary pressure.
The office is empty now. The walls are painted a pale green, waiting for the National Park Service to furnish and prepare it for the steady procession of visitors who will come looking for history.
And as the AJC and UATL continue to mark Black History Month, we will continue to share that history and those stories with you. This week, Christopher Daniel’s stories on the resilience of Darnell Lamont Walker and the art of Carl Joe Williams remind us that hard work still matters, that creation is its own form of testimony. Kelly Yamanouchi’s piece on how the dreams of Black children can literally rise into the clouds through aviation training insists that the sky has never been the limit, only the beginning.
And if I can fan out for a second, this week I talked to Courtney B. Vance and David Levering Lewis about the audiobook release of the two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of W.E.B. Du Bois. Three of my favorites. Voices carrying voices. Memory speaking to memory.
That is the quiet miracle of living in Atlanta. There is always another door. Another room. Another story.
You can find all of these stories, and stories like them, every week when you follow and support UATL. Speaking of good stories coming out every week, Season 2 of our podcast “It’s UATL” premieres next Wednesday. You can listen to the trailer here.
About the Author
Ernie Suggs is an enterprise reporter covering race and culture for the AJC since 1997. A 1990 graduate of N.C. Central University and a 2009 Harvard University Nieman Fellow, he is also the former vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. His obsession with Prince, Spike Lee movies, Hamilton and the New York Yankees is odd.
