The parsonage was built in 1912 in Centennial Hill, a middle- and upper-class African American neighborhood in Montgomery. It is a modest clapboard cottage with a pyramidal roof and a full-width front porch -- the kind of house a comfortable Black family might own in the early twentieth-century South. In 1919, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church purchased it for use as its minister's residence. Over the decades, a succession of pastors lived there, each serving the church and the community from this small house on a quiet residential street.

Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Montgomery in 1954 to become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was 25, freshly married to Coretta Scott, and completing his doctoral dissertation at Boston University. The young couple moved into the parsonage on South Jackson Street. Their first child, Yolanda, was born in November 1955 -- just weeks before Rosa Parks's arrest on December 1 would launch the bus boycott and transform King from a young minister into the leader of a mass movement. The parsonage became both family home and operational nerve center. Strategy sessions took place in the living room. Phone calls came at all hours. The modest house on Centennial Hill was suddenly at the center of American history.

The bomb hit the porch on the evening of January 30, 1956, almost exactly two months after the boycott began. King was away, speaking at a church meeting. Coretta, baby Yolanda, and a visiting church member were inside. The explosion damaged the front of the house but injured no one. Police arrested seven white men days later; two signed confessions. An all-white jury acquitted them. The bombing, however, accomplished the opposite of its intent. National media coverage focused attention on Montgomery. Photographs of the damaged house circulated across the country. And King's response -- calm, nonviolent, quoting Scripture to an angry crowd on his own damaged lawn -- became the defining image of the movement's moral authority.

King and his family left the parsonage in 1960 when he moved to Atlanta. The house was remodeled in 1966 -- the back porch enclosed, the kitchen modernized -- but original mantels, mouldings, and doors survive. Much of the furniture is the same that the King family used. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and opened as the Dexter Parsonage Museum, operated by the church. Visitors walk through the rooms where the Kings slept, ate, and planned, and stand on the porch that was rebuilt after the bombing. It is a small house that held an enormous story, preserved exactly because ordinary domestic spaces are where courage is tested most.