The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. might have captured the attention of the world with his March on Washington and the letter he wrote from jail in Birmingham. But those who knew him best believed the place that most defined him — and remains the beating heart of his legacy — is a few gritty blocks near downtown Atlanta.
The old sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, where he inherited a pulpit that had been his father’s and grandfather’s, became a fixture in a national park dedicated to Dr. King that draws hundreds of thousands of people each year. A block away, the two-story Victorian that was his boyhood home has also been preserved as part of the park.
Yet a little farther down the street, the windowless office in the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge where Dr. King wrote speeches and mapped out strategies for the fight for civil rights was all but neglected. In a city with a reputation for tightly embracing its ties to Dr. King, here was a landmark of his legacy that was overlooked and in danger of being lost.
Now, the building has a new roof. Old wiring has been stripped and replaced. The office on the first floor, where Dr. King’s children remember visiting him while he worked, has been painted the precise pistachio shade that it was back then. Soon that space will be open to the public, as the building has been restored and added to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park.
The park’s mission is to reflect the arc of the civil rights leader’s life, from birth to death. But park officials and civic leaders in Atlanta recognized a gap when it came to vividly depicting the activism that had made Dr. King a singular figure in American life. The restoration, they said, is a significant step toward filling it.
“This really gives a full reflection of who Martin Luther King Jr. was,” said Martin Luther King III, Dr. King’s eldest son.
But for him and others, excitement about the park’s expansion has been tempered by concern about the Trump administration’s efforts to paper over some of the uglier elements of the country’s history.
The National Park Service has come under a mandate to promote what the administration considers a more positive portrayal of America’s past. In an executive order last year, President Trump said that historical markers and printed materials at parks should emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.”
The Park Service recently dismantled an exhibit at the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia examining George Washington’s treatment of enslaved people. Earlier this month, an L.G.B.T.Q. flag was removed from the Stonewall National Monument in New York after a directive from the federal government. The Park Service has also removed signage about abuse of Native Americans and the consequences of climate change.
“When you have an administration every day trying to get rid of history, I don’t know what that means,” Mr. King said. “But what I do know is the public must continue to weigh in.”
Officials at King National Park said they were confident that exhibits in the lodge, as in the rest of the park, would be able to keep illuminating Dr. King’s life, and the times and community he inhabited, in all their complexity. Reginald Chapple, the park’s superintendent, noted that Mr. Trump had signed the legislation designating it as a national historic park in 2018, during his first term, with two King family members flanking him.
Now, he said of the Trump administration, “They’re telling us to proceed with our enabling legislation.”
The addition of the lodge figures into a more sweeping overhaul of the park, which spreads across nearly 40 acres in a neighborhood called Sweet Auburn, just east of downtown.
The visitors center is undergoing a $7 million overhaul. Since Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Chapple said, the park has received additional federal money for renovating Dr. King’s boyhood home, as well as the home on Atlanta’s west side where he and his wife, Coretta, raised their children.
“We’re seeing an investment in this history, not a divestment,” Mr. Chapple said.
The lodge is, for now, a blank slate: New exhibits and displays are still being arranged, and will be installed in the coming weeks and months. As part of that effort, the park service is gathering oral histories from people with ties to the building and what went on inside it.
The park was established in 1980 as a “national historic site,” the culmination of efforts begun by Coretta Scott King after her husband’s assassination that eventually succeeded despite initial opposition from many corners.
In 2018, Representative John Lewis, a pioneering civil rights leader and King associate who died in 2020, championed the legislation making the site a national historic park and expanding its boundaries to include the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge.
The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit, is leading the $14 million restoration of the lodge, which is being paid for with federal and private funds.
For a significant stretch of the 20th century, Sweet Auburn was a bustling example of possibility: stores, nightclubs, newspaper offices, all owned by Black entrepreneurs.
Inside the lodge, the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization Dr. King helped found and led, was on the first floor. WERD, the first Black-owned and -operated radio station in the country, had its studios on the second. Black Freemasons, who built the lodge and had many prominent civic leaders as members, had a meeting space on the top floor.
“You always came to Auburn Avenue,” said Edward W. Bowen, a longtime member of the local Masonic lodge who grew up in the neighborhood a generation behind Dr. King. “This has always been the core.”
But in the following years, as with the cores of many American cities, disinvestment hollowed out Sweet Auburn. A new highway, which eventually grew to 15 lanes, split the neighborhood. The lodge emptied out.
Once the restoration is complete, much of the space will look as it did when Dr. King worked there, down to the voluminous but tidy stacks of papers and framed portrait of Mohandas Gandhi. A nonprofit will move into the radio station’s old home, with offices that still have soundproofing tiles on the walls. The Masons plan to gather more frequently upstairs.
George Dusenbury, a vice president for the Trust for Public Land, the nonprofit overseeing the restoration, acknowledged the challenging climate, including efforts to limit how American history is taught and steep cuts in federal funding. But by saving the lodge, he said, “We’re ensuring it will outlast the political debates of any particular moment.”
Calinda N. Lee, a historian and former museum leader in Atlanta, said the park’s success in teaching younger generations about Dr. King’s legacy and the neighborhood’s role in it hinged on whether the story it tells feels complete, honest — and relevant to them.
“History is not the past,” Dr. Lee said. “History is what the past means for the present. And so, I want to see an understanding of what this has to do with us now.”
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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