Online and on the road: honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK Jr. Memorial Stone of Hope Photo Credit: NPS/volunteer Bill Shugarts

On January 16, as America celebrates the life and achievements of Martin Luther King Jr., what better way to seize the day and take this opportunity to learn more about this influential American civil rights leader and the cause about which he was so passionate.

• To read a brief overview of Dr. King’s life
• To watch a video on a summary of the March on Washington
• To listen to Dr. King’s iconic “I have a Dream” speech, complete with subtitles
• To view Dr. King’s life in pictures (125 of them), visit
• To learn more about Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, watch how NBC news covered it at

If you are motivated to hit the road and learn more about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement, here are a few places I would recommend to visit:

For Dr. King

• Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site (Atlanta, GA):
  • Right across the street is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial (Washington, DC)

The original portion of the lunch counter and stools where the four students sat on Feb. 1, 1960, has never been moved from its original footprint. At the International Civil Rights Center and Museum

For the Civil Rights Movement in general

• The National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel (the site of Dr. King’s assassination)
• Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (Birmingham, AL)
  • Right across the street is the 16^th Street Baptist Church, site of the bombing in 1963 that killed four little girls
• National Museum of African-American History and Culture
• The International Civil Rights Center and Museum (site of the first sit-in in 1963 in Greensboro, NC)
• Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail (AL)
• The Center for Civil and Human Rights (Atlanta, GA)

Sally Leety was a teacher at the Rupert A. Nock Middle School in Newburyport, MA for 34 years and taught democratic education to her eighth-graders. Since high school, Ms. Leety has been interested in civil rights education and, recently, was fortunate enough to attend three National Endowment for the Humanities workshops in Alabama (2010), Georgia (2013), and Mississippi (2015), where she visited many icon sites and learned more about the movement from scholars and those who participated in it. She used this newly-acquired knowledge to develop a comprehensive unit on the Civil Rights Movement, which quickly became a favorite of her students. Upon her retirement from teaching in 2016, a collection of books in the Nock library on the Civil Rights Movement were named in her honor.