Travel and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  01.16.06 | 2:01 AM ET

We thought we’d pay our respects to Martin Luther King Jr. today by spotlighting a few key sights important to his life and the civil rights movement. Ben Brazil’s guide to sights in Sunday’s Washington Post turned out to be a good resource. It mentions the two-story Victorian home in Atlanta’s “Sweet Auburn” section where King was born Jan. 15, 1929. That home, where King spent his first 12 years, is now the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, operated by the National Park Service. Also mentioned is the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where King was assassinated April 4, 1968. In 1991, after years of decline, it opened as the National Civil Rights Museum, exploring the legacy of the civil rights movement.

This online register of historic places of the civil rights movement, put together by a number of federal agencies, is excellent, listing sights from the Paul Robeson Home in New York to the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in Massachusetts. It features the King photo that leads off this article.

Beyond these many established sights, there’s another in the works that blends civil rights and literary history. Reuters, among other news organizations, reported recently that the rural Maryland cabin that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” will be preserved, thanks to its purchase by state officials. It will be turned into a museum, according to other news organizations.

According to Reuters:

In the early 19th century, the gray log cabin was home to Josiah Henson, a slave Stowe used as a model for the Uncle Tom character in her novel, a global bestseller that ignited abolitionist fervor in the United States before the Civil War.

Montgomery County’s planning board voted unanimously to buy a one-acre (.405 hectare) property in the heart of one of the Washington area’s hottest real estate markets. The parcel includes both the cabin and an attached 18th century house.

The little cabin and attached house that were once part of Isaac Riley’s 3,700-acre tobacco plantation now sit behind a fringe of trees on a busy suburban thoroughfare a few miles from the Washington Beltway. The simple cabin’s interior has the original stone hearth although the dirt floor has been replaced by wood.

Finally, for armchair travelers, I want to mention a thought-provoking documentary I saw last year on the Discovery Times Cable Channel called “MLK Boulevard,” which premiered in October 2003 but is shown again from time to time. It’s a travelogue, of sorts, that takes in many of the Martin Luther King, Jr. boulevards across the United States, exploring King’s legacy on the streets that bear his name. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a Web site dedicated to the film, just a few scattered references. In any case, it’s worth checking out if it is repeated.

Tags: North America, United States, Georgia


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