In front of the King Birth Home with Ranger Marty Smith

Volunteers from the Greening Youth Foundation came up with the perfect way to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday: by working at Atlanta’s Martin Luther King National Historic Site, where thousands of visitors spent the day exploring and reflecting on the life of the iconic leader.

It was also a fitting day of volunteer work for the GYF crew for another reason: the MLK site, run by the National Park Service, is one of GYF’s most important partners in the foundation’s quest to introduce young people to careers in land management and environmental conservation. Indeed, in the coming months the Greening Youth Foundation will be sending numerous crews of young people to the King site to work in internships and to help “green” the dozens of historic structures on the site. GYF’s “Green the King” project hopes to improve the site’s energy and water efficiency, make appropriate use of its renewable energy sources, reduce the site’s waste streams, improve its indoor air quality, and improve building comfort and performance. The partnership of GYF and the MLK site has even received a transportation grant from the National Park Foundation that will allow GYF to bring its Eco-Force members from the GYF schools to the King site for an Earth Day celebration in April.

A young GYF volunteer hands out a map

But on the national holiday celebrating King’s birthday, the GYF volunteers—young and not so young—had the main objective of assisting the throngs of visitors as they made their way around the site, providing maps and directions and answering questions. To insure that the GYF volunteers were well-versed on the layout and history of the site, Ranger Marty Smith, one of the rangers assigned to the MLK site, gave the group an early morning tour before the visitors started to amass. The highlight of the tour was the visit to the birth home of Dr. King, the modest two-story, yellow-and-brown wooden frame house where Martin was born and spent his childhood. It is a thrilling experience to view the home preserved in the exact same condition as it was when young Martin ran its halls and sat at its grand dining room table with the formal place settings that the King family used every night—Martin Sr. believed in the family eating together as a group every night of the week. Martin was born at 12 noon on the king-sized bed in his parents’ bedroom, and the clock sitting on the mantle above the room’s fireplace has been permanently set to noon.

Listeners follow the King Day festivities from outside the church

Once the festivities began, the GYF volunteers passed out site maps to the overflow crowd outside that watched on a big jumbotron screen the ceremony that was taking place inside of the fabulous 11-year-old “horizon” sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church. Dr. King’s sister, Christine King Farris, was the master of ceremonies and Dr. Cornel West gave a rousing, thought-provoking keynote address during which he suggested that Dr. King would be fighting hard for the nation’s poor if he were still alive today.

GYF volunteers wave during King Day March

The GYF volunteers capped off the warm, sunny day by participating in the tail-end of the King Day March, which started in downtown Atlanta and made its way all the way up Auburn Avenue to end at the King site, near the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. For the younger volunteers, it was their first time joining an official “march” and their gleeful faces revealed their excitement at being part of the flowing sea of humanity that walked and sang its way up Sweet Auburn Avenue. After the march ended, the strains of the old spiritual, “Amen,” still drifted through the air.

“Everybody say Amen…”