National Center Receives $58M Expansion and Facelift

The National Center for Civil and Human Rights reopened earlier this month, with a series of exhibits that refocus and reinforce the center’s role in dramatizing America’s struggle for social and political equality. The newly expanded and redesigned museum, located next to the Georgia Aquarium, has been under construction for most of this year. It has doubled in size and features a lighter and brighter look than when it first opened in 2013.

At the heart of the new building is an exhibit of the writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which are on loan from his archives at Morehouse College. Highlighted on one wall are the words of his wife, Coretta Scott King, which seems to sum up the message that is reinforced in the new structure.

“Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”

The guest curator of the room filled with the King documents is his daughter, the Rev. Dr. Bernice King, who is the CEO of The King Center in Atlanta. She spoke forcefully at the building’s dedication ceremonies of the impact of her father’s words in today’s world.

“They speak urgently to our time,” King said, “a time of rising authoritarianism, fractured democracy and communities under siege. My father’s words always remind us that we are caught in an inescapable net of mutuality tied to a single garment of destiny.”

There are five new exhibits in the $58 million expansion, with a fifth exhibit opening next month about the legacy of racial injustice in the years following the end of the Civil War. A sixth exhibit, which opens in April of next year, is an interactive gallery for children under 12 that focuses on how they can bring about change in society.

The new children’s exhibit will open in the west wing of the building, known as the Arthur M. Blank Inspiration Hall, in honor of the Atlanta philanthropist and co-founder of The Home Depot. His remarks in opening the new building called particular attention to the effort to make the exhibits more attractive to children.

“Kids are a third of our population,” Blank said, “and 100 percent of our future. So, the ability for the children to come into this space and understand the importance of the history and the learnings of civil rights and human rights is never more important than it is today.”

Blank’s $25 million contribution was the key to the building out of the structure, which has been on hold during the fundraising campaign.

His commitment, though, was only part of the effort to complete the structure. Much of the credit for the successful capital campaign over the years goes to . He helped lead the Board of the Center from its beginnings. The work that he’s done, he believes, is an extension of the Jewish values that have been such an important part of his life.

“Human rights, civil rights, it’s part of Jewish history,” Robinson observes. “It’s what you learn at an early age in Jewish education. And the message of this center is to go out and repair the world, which is, as we know, tikkun olam. We want to teach people here how to do that and be inspired to go do that.”

That planning for the expansion began not long after Jill Savitt, who serves as the center’s president and CEO, came to Atlanta in 2019 from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She has a deep appreciation for the relationship between the civil rights campaign in America and the fight for human rights elsewhere in the world.

“I’ve been in the human rights field for 30 years, and what I’ve seen, especially in this moment, is how quickly gains you thought were won can be erased.” Savitt said, ‘Telling the history, the truth of history, a more complete history, and linking it to our lives today is something that we all could benefit from hearing.”

For Arthur Blank the ceremonies opening the new building came just hours before he was scheduled to fly to Berlin, where the Atlanta Falcons were scheduled to play against the Indianapolis Colts. He couldn’t help but acknowledge in his remarks to the Atlanta Jewish Times the irony that marked the occasion.

“We’ll spend a lot of time in Berlin, visiting a lot of sites that are sorrowfully important to not only people of the Jewish faith, but humanity. And so, it’s just another reminder that we really are brothers and sisters, and that we have to find what’s connecting us and not what separates us, and that’s a stress today in our country. We have to do better than we’re currently doing.”