There are many events, parades and tributes honoring the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today ~ here is one story of many on how the day is being commemorated.
Historic site’s keeper is living tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.
By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
January 15, 2012, 6:35 p.m.
Reporting from Atlanta—
For the woman in charge of the civil rights leader’s crypt, birth home and church, Monday is the biggest day of the year.
Judy Forte plans to report to her government job Monday morning without a hint of complaint.
She is 54 and superintendent of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service. The King holiday is her Super Bowl.
Thousands will make their way Monday to Auburn Avenue, just east of downtown Atlanta, to bear witness at King’s outdoor crypt, and to tour his birth home. They will crowd into the civil rights history display underneath Forte’s office, and the meticulously preserved old Ebenezer Baptist Church across the street, where King preached and plotted his nonviolent revolution.
For Forte, there will be dozens of rangers and volunteers to direct while she frets over security, crowd control and fire codes. Her staff, by custom, will discuss the history of the movement with visitors according to their ages and their relationship to its epochal events.
Forte tells them to expect three categories of tourist.
There is the generation of people like her, who directly benefited from the work of the civil rights foot soldiers.
There are the foot soldiers themselves — people like her late father, Jimmie Lee Goodwin, an Alabama mill worker who joined King on the last leg of the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. These, she recommends, are the visitors to whom one listens, not lectures.
Then there are the younger ones. “A generation of kids who only know Dr. King as a historical figure, or from a coloring book,” she said. “To them he’s almost not real.”
Read the complete article and more from latimes.com – HERE
