National Park Service buys MLK Jr’s birth home

ATLANTA – The National Park Service has bought the home in Atlanta, Georgia, where Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929.

Citing a National Park Foundation release, news outlets report the civil rights leader’s family has owned the home on Auburn Avenue for more than a century and closed the sale last month for an undisclosed amount. Congress declared the home a National Historic Site in 1980, and the National Park Service began offering tours of it in 1982.

The home was built in 1895 for a white family and bought by King’s maternal grandfather in 1909 for $3,500. King’s mother inherited it. King’s younger brother, A.D. King, and his family were the last of the King line to live there.