AMERICA - Ebenezer Baptist Church

"At Ebenezer Baptist Church, a Glorious Rebirth" by KIM SEVERSON, New York Times 4/21/2011

Each of the 90 federal historic sites in the United States has its appeal. But for all their cultural value, the sites don’t change much. A studious tour given by a park ranger. A plaque to read. Another note in a travel journal.

But this week, one of the sites held the sort of electric charge usually not found among dusty period chairs and explanatory dioramas.

Inside the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church (opens in new page) — the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was both baptized and eulogized — a new, meticulous renovation underscored the weight of one of the most significant social movements in modern America.

The power, according to some of the record 20,000 people who visited the church this week, is in the personal nature of such recent history contained in the small Gothic Revival building on the corner of Auburn Avenue and Jackson Street.

“We lived the segregated South,” said Lily Townsend, 77, who walked through Thursday with her husband, Ronald, a member of the Pensacola, Fla., City Council.

“There’s an emotion when you come here,” she said. “A tear comes to your eye for all that started here.”

The doors to the church opened Friday after four years and $8 million of detailed work to make it look exactly as it did during the 1960s, when Dr. King and his father stood on the pulpit and preached.

Restoration teams analyzed paint chips to recreate the exact soft peach color of the walls and uncovered the tall, painted-glass windows.

They studied old photographs of the fellowship hall in the basement, setting period green and white tile so the floor looked like it did when Dr. King held meetings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group he formed in 1957.

A visitor can walk within an arm’s reach of the pulpit where Dr. King gave his famous "Drum Major Instinct” speech, in which he delivered his own eulogy. Two months later, April 9, 1968, his real eulogy would be delivered from the same pulpit.

There is the microphone that carried his words, and a communion tray he passed.

Although the Ebenezer congregation moved to a larger, more modern church across the street in 1999, they held a special service Thursday night. It was to honor their 125th year.

There won’t be many such services at the church in the future. The National Park Service keeps the doors open seven days a week.

Groups that want to use the church will have to request a special permit, said Judy Forte, the superintendent.

A recording of Dr. King’s voice loops through the sound system, and the mood changes with each group that enters.

Schoolchildren laugh. Foreign tourists crowd for photographs in front of the pulpit.

But when the church is empty, save for a few people in quiet reflection, there is a feeling that something more than history might have happened here.

“From here, he found the power to just spread his wings,” said Patsy Cherry, 66, a retired schoolteacher visiting from Chesapeake, Va. “I came to feel that.”