Best known as the city where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus, and the resulting Montgomery bus boycott, the city is also home to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King served as pastor from 1954 to 1960. His home during that time, the church's parsonage, is a white clapboard bungalow located about one-half mile from the downtown sanctuary. On January 30, 1956, during the height of the boycott, the house was firebombed. And though King's wife, daughter, and a church member were in the home at the time, no one was injured.

Today, the home, which was the residence for a total of 12 Dexter pastors and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, is a museum dedicated to King's life and times there. The living quarters have been restored to evoke the 1950s era, complete with a Magnavox record player, vinyl-upholstered kitchen chairs, and a hatbox from the upscale Montgomery Fair department store, where Parks worked as a seamstress. A crater on the porch, which marks the spot where the bomb hit, has been left as a historic reminder and is explained with an official plaque.

The garden at the rear of the house is where dozens gathered to share their eyewitness accounts about the birth of the movement. As a young student at the time at Alabama State University, Richard Jordan remembers secretly using the old-fashioned mimeograph machine in the president's office to copy thousands of leaflets that were distributed in the community, urging people to boycott the buses. Timothy Mays was the young boy photographed on "Bloody Sunday" carrying the American flag while being beaten as he attempted to march from Selma to this city to demand voting rights. He would later go on to work, defying danger and death threats, as a voting rights activist.

"I wound up being the rebel of the 18 children that my mother and father had," Mays said. "I was a student leader when I was in high school and I came over to the Alabama State University. Right out here on Jackson Avenue, I closed down Alabama State University during my freshman year. George Wallace said that we weren't supposed to participate in no civil rights and I wasn't thinking about George Wallace. It had nothing to do with integration. It had to do with being treated fairly¡Xand I didn't think we were treated fairly."

Pearl Gray Daniels, sister of attorney Fred D. Gray, who was pivotal in many of the era's legal challenges, remembers that her siblings were repeatedly denied public teaching jobs as a way of warning them against their brother's activities.

Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, a brick structure located one block from the state capitol, was designated a national historic landmark by the National Park Service. Today, the humble sanctuary, with its baby blue walls and long wooden pews topped by burgundy cushions, was quiet but echoed loud with times past. On one long wall of the ground level, artist John Feagin has painted a mural that depicts the travails and triumphs of African Americans in the American South, and King's life.

"I was a student during that time," Feagin said, on hand at the church. "It was an exciting time. You could tell that history was about to be changed."