In Anticipation of Martin Luther King Day

Southern War Monuments

by J. Michael O’Neil

In great measure the oldest monuments and buildings in today’s Metro Atlanta have been standing little more than one hundred years. William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign and its aftermath saw to that. Sherman, who couldn’t remember actually using the phrase with which he is universally credited, “War is Hell,” surely did write, “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
The monuments on Atlanta’s Auburn Street are of considerably more recent vintage. Less famous perhaps than Peachtree Street, sweet Auburn, as it came to be known in its salad days, is the neighborhood where the King family lived and thrived--where Martin Luther King, Jr. was born, where he grew up, and where his body now lies.
On a quiet gray December weekday, long after the hoopla of the hot Summer Olympics has cooled down, is a good time to visit a cluster of four sites there. They are the house in which Martin Luther King was born and lived (50l Auburn), Ebenezer Baptist Church where he was co-pastor with his father (407-13 Auburn), the Freedom Hall Complex which includes his grave site and the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change (now headed by his younger son Dexter Scott King), and the new National Park Service Visitor Center (450 Auburn).
My wife and I could only spend a little time there that morning. It was the end of a trip and we had to be at the airport soon, to return the rental car and board a flight that would carry us back home and to Christmas. Still, it was enough time to fix a few things in memory’s indelible eye.
The film at the Visitor Center was viewed by nine people--six of us, a black family running the gamut of age, the rest of us white--in a theater built to hold 200. Our group’s small size gave us a more intimate sense of shared experience.
The narrator’s professionally dulcet and measured voice (certainly that of Julian Bond) led us through a straightforward accounting of Martin Luther King’s life and death with interviews, still shots, film clips and soundbites from a few of the more beautiful, unforgettable speeches. Here is a black insurance agent calmly explaining how he insisted on picking up the church’s insurance, canceled by the white power structure in an attempt to break one of the first boycotts, fully realizing that his business would almost surely be ruined. “What I explained to them back then,” he says to the camera, “was that insurance is the business of assuming risk, and that’s what I was intent on doing.” Here are John Lewis and Andrew Young reminiscing about their leader’s brilliant ability to create consensus at the end of a day’s meeting with his brawling, cacophonous, civil rights sublieutenants. Coretta Scott King fondly recalls her first sight of her future husband: He looked so young and thin. Here too is the public man, preaching , counseling, being arrested, being awarded the Nobel prize and finally, assassinated. See if you can sit through it without its cumulative force bringing a lump to your throat, and at least one tear.

2. O’Neil--Southern War Monuments

His body lies at rest across the street in a large marble sepulcher. The tomb is outdoors, set on a platform in the middle of a long rectangular pool of calm blue water which is fed by geysering fountains. The pool is surrounded by legions of international flags and its shape reminds one of the reflecting pool at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Hewn deeply into the tomb’s marble are the words:

FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST
THANK GOD ALMIGHTY
I’M FREE AT LAST

Next door is the spiritual and logistical linchpin--Ebenezer Baptist Church. Its plain brick facade belies the turmoil it has witnessed--both the beatific successes and the cruel horrors attendant upon any war. Almost as an epilogue to her son’s death, the bizarre murder of King’s mother, Alberta Williams King, took place here in 1974--six years after he was killed. She was shot to death by an assassin as she was playing the church organ. So much joy, so much pain to be centered in one building.
On this chilly December morning, as we walk by Ebenezer Baptist, back to the rental car, the pastor bounds down the church’s front steps hurrying to some appointment, slows as he sees us, smiles and says, “Hi--how you doin’?” We greet him back, smiling, in kind. And then we go our separate ways.
It was just a simple exchange of goodwill, but on reflection it was the most compelling monument Sweet Auburn could possibly have erected.