A Trip to the Mountaintop | Following in the Footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Georgia’s Civil Rights Trail

Less than a day later from that prophetic speech, Dr. King was assassinated at his hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.

With a heavy lump in my throat, so began my trip along Georgia’s Civil Rights Trail, a portion of the all-encompassing Civil Rights Trail across 14 states and the District of Columbia.

The decades went on and eventually, the brothers left the business only to return in 2002 to open a 21st-century iteration of Paschal’s on Northside Drive near the original location. The brothers have since passed on, but Mr. Marshall Slack, 79, knew and worked for them almost his entire life. He remains a staple of Paschal’s, shaking hands with familiar passersby and telling stories.

Slack, dressed in a gray suit with a purple button-up and a red cloth coming out of his chest pocket, excitedly reflects on working for the Paschal brothers as a young man, starting as a nine-year-old boy, and what their businesses meant for the African-American community throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Not only did they give African-Americans a place to have dinner and listen to music in friendly company, but they also helped bring segregated groups together.

“White people didn’t have any kind of entertainment, so they started coming,” says Slack, referring to the big names who came to La Carrousel. “Eventually the governor started coming and people from all over Atlanta, too.”

He gushes about the Paschal’s Motor Hotel having “the most beautiful rooms you’d see in the state of Georgia,” and how they wouldn’t charge Dr. King for anything as long as he ate their fried chicken.

When it came time to do his part for the movement, Slack didn’t hesitate, following instructions from the Paschal’s themselves.

“They’d send me out to Alabama to bail Dr. King and others in the movement out of jail,” says Slack. “And we’d feed them and have them call their parents.”

Paschal’s is open seven days a week with their “Famous 1947 Fried Chicken” still on the menu.

From The King Center, Tom Houck rolls up in his shuttle bus to take a group of us on a Civil Rights Tour of Atlanta. Houck, a white man originally from Massachusetts, worked as a driver for the King family over nine months when he was 19 and instantaneously became involved with the Southern Leadership Conference.

Before starting the tour, Houck spots Dr. C.T. Vivian, a minister and close comrade of Dr. King throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Houck leans out of the bus and waves him over, asking him to share a few words with the tour group. Dr. Vivian, 93 in number only, springs onto the bus to share a few quick words on what his old friend meant to him and the importance of coming together 50 years after the assassination to both acknowledge how far we’ve come and how far we still have to climb.

Houck’s Civil Rights Tour feels familiar to anyone who’s done a bus tour, though the content is decidedly focused on Civil Rights. We skirt along quiet residential streets as Houck, standing in the aisle, points out houses and buildings left and right involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Sometimes he asks the driver to pull over to allow us to take in the sight from the window, like at the John Lewis Mural on Auburn Avenue.

Longer drives are filled with recorded interviews playing on bus television monitors, filmed exclusively for Houck’s tour. Among the familiar faces are Andrew Young, Julian Bond, and yes, Congressman John Lewis himself. When the video stops, Houck calls on his friend, Eartha Sims, a local gospel singer to belt out Freedom Songs, like “This Little Light Of Mine.”

We step out on occasion, most memorably at King’s final Atlanta residence at 234 Sunset Avenue. “The Kings lived very modestly,” says Houck, standing on the staircase outside the red brick home.

Then it was off to South-View Cemetery, a place with a strong African-American heritage that Houck thought ought to be more prominent on any traveler’s itinerary — The Civil Rights Trail or otherwise. The cemetery’s director hops on the bus to point out a few notable graves before we stop at the King site. Dr. King was originally buried here himself alongside his parents.

Walking around the crypt, the director of the cemetery points out a few round indents. “These marks were left by bullets fired shortly after he was buried here.” The family opted not to cover it up as a reminder of what Dr. King was fighting against.

Back in downtown Atlanta, a bell-ringing ceremony is about to take place at the Center for Civil and Humans Rights featuring museum staff, visitors, and members of the community. Thirty-nine famous quotes from Dr. King are passed out, one for each year of his life, to be read one-by-one starting at 7:05 p.m. — precisely 50 years after he was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Participants gather in front of a mural featuring a raised hand in the center. Social justice protest slogans from around the world — Chile, South Africa, Myanmar — surround the open palm.

When the ceremony is finished and the last bell rung, museum staff offer their thanks to the participants and everyone scatters off to view the exhibitions. “Check out the lunch counter,” suggests Kristie Raymer, VP of Marketing and Sales at the Center. “It’ll change your life.”

The lunch counter exhibit attempts to recreate what Civil Rights protestors experienced during sit-ins in the segregated South. You have a seat on a recreated luncheonette stool, put on some headphones, and the vitriol starts pouring out as soon as you place both hands on the table in front of you. The chair shakes to mimic racists pushing you. As soon as you lift your hands, it stops, and you give up your seat to the long line waiting behind you.

Besides helping new generations remember the past, the Center for Civil and Humans Rights is front and center on the civil rights issues of our day. Responding to the ongoing refugee crisis, they held a community discussion featuring speakers who came to the United States as refugees themselves to talk about how they’re trying to change the narrative of refugees in this country.

“It’s very important to us to be part of a global dialogue around rights,” says Raymer. “The museum sets the stage for us to be thought leaders in the space of Civil and Human Rights. By reflecting on the past we can become inspired and transform the future.”

The Gullah/Geechee community of Pin Point, Georgia is just six miles outside of Savannah, but it feels like its hours away with its tall grasses, fresh sea air, and rural backdrop. The settlement on the Moon River was founded in 1896 by freed slaves who made their living off the land and sea.

Oyster canning became the business in town, which you can get a taste of at the Pin Point Heritage Museum housed in the former Varn and Sons Oyster Caning Factory in operation from 1926 to 1985. Hanif Haynes is a tour guide (or historical interpreter, as they say in Pin Point) who grew up in town. He details the brutal conditions that women worked in as we walk through the facility, frozen in time with placards walking guests through the process of how the women shucked shells harvested by the men.

On the lighter side, you get a sense of the good-hearted, tight-knit community. Everyone who grows up in Pin Point gets a nickname, sometimes from the Gullah language, English, or a slang-mashing of the two. There’s Pigeon, Pig, Eye, Boss Turkey, Wasp, Hemo, Peetro, and Bacon — because “he brought home the bacon.”

You learn this watching the short documentary Take Me To the Water at the start of the tour. The filmmakers embedded themselves into the community for over a month, giving viewers a unique insight into life in Pin Point. Supreme Court Justice Judge Clarence Thomas, a Pin Point local, is among the many voices you hear in the film praising the modest, fulfilling, and supportive environment that a kid like him had growing up on the banks of the Moon River.