MARION, Ala. (AP) – Bullet holes pock a rusted mailbox outside the vacant home where Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott were married in 1953. Part of the old wooden structure has collapsed, as have nearby utility buildings.
Most anyplace connected to the best-known voice of the civil rights movement is a magnet for tourists, particularly around the January holiday honoring King’s birthday and in February during Black History Month. His birthplace in Atlanta is a national historic park; the parsonage where he and his wife lived in Montgomery is part of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail.
Yet the spot where the Kings spent one of the most important days of their lives – the childhood home of Coretta Scott King, who went on to found the King Center in Atlanta following her husband’s assassination in 1968 – sits all but unknown on the side of a two-lane highway in rural Perry County, one of Alabama’s poorest places. Even some locals remain largely unaware of its historical importance.
“I don’t really know anything about the house,” said Kay Beckett, president of the Perry County Historical and Preservation Society.
An expert said the Scott home is one of many important Black historical sites that have been forgotten across the nation.