All tours at the Atlanta Civil Rights museum are self-guided and will take visitors to any or all of three galleries.

Outside of the Martin Luther King Jr. collection, the center is not a repository of artifacts. Instead it is what exhibit designer David Mandel calls "experiential."

The museum housed in an elegantly curved structure with a moss lawn for a roof, offers visitors a history of the freedom movement in the United States, told from Atlanta's perspective, and an accounting of the modern human rights activism that civil rights pioneers inspired.