A home can be the starting place where great leaders learn to be great. It’s here, where our families, communities and neighborhoods shape who we become. Today as a nation, we observe and honor the accomplishments and life of Martin Luther King Jr. To best understand who he was, I tracked down his birth home, which helped shape his journey to becoming one of the country’s most influential leaders.

The Atlanta Connection                                                                

On Jan. 15, 1929 Michael (later changed to Martin) Luther King Jr. was born upstairs in a two-story, Queen Anne-style home at 501 Auburn Ave. in Atlanta. Preserved as a historical landmark, King’s birth home can only be visited with a park ranger-led tour. The home was constructed in 1895, and was purchased in 1909 by King’s maternal grandfather, Reverend Adam Daniel (A.D.) Williams for $3,500. When King’s father married Alberta Williams, the family moved into the house in 1926. The first level includes a front porch, parlor, study, dining room, kitchen, laundry, bedroom and bathroom. The second level includes four bedrooms and one bathroom.

According to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic site, the civil rights leader resided in the home with his parents, two siblings, grandmother and Aunt Ida. It has been written that King, who had a special bond with his Grandmother Williams, spent many of his days sitting in the kitchen listening to her stories and sampling her rich cooking. He shared a room on the second floor with his younger brother Alfred Daniel. With an affinity for reading, the boys’ rooms were always full of books. At the end of each day, King’s grandmother and mother would read to the children. Because the women often selected passages from The Book of Knowledge, the children learned about faraway places and people, different ideas, and the world outside Georgia. King, who skipped high school, enrolled in Morehouse College in Atlanta when he was only 15 years old.

It takes a village                                                                   

Segregation during that period made it difficult for African-Americans to get public accommodations like hotels, so the King household was always busy entertaining friends and family. The children often slept in the hallways to allow guests to use their rooms.

Everyone, including the children, were expected to pull their weight in the home and chores were strictly enforced. It was believed that King’s favorite chore was stocking the basement furnace with coal he collected from a shed in their backyard.

In his autobiography, Martin Luther King Sr. said: “When the boys began earning a little money through neighborhood odd jobs, Mother promoted a very simple plan for them. They were to consider the division into three parts of all the money their jobs or allowances brought them. Mother called these divisions “The King Home’s Three S’s: Spending, Saving, and Sharing.”

For decades, many of the Queen Anne homes that line Auburn Avenue had deteriorated to burned-out shells, and had become shelters to vagrants and drug users. But thanks to a $10 million renovation project spearheaded by the King family and undertaken by the park service nine years ago, today nearly all of the single-family homes, duplexes and shotgun houses on the block — dating back to the turn of century— boast restored wooden porches and fresh coats of buttercream yellow, baby blue or burgundy paint.

While King’s birth home remains mostly untouched, encapsulated in time for visitors to relish, the world around it has been changed forever.

Get a tour of King’s historic home at nps.gov.