MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA - In 1955, a young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. picked up the kitchen telephone in the Baptist church parsonage where he and his family lived. On the other end, an angry white man threatened to kill him. <br>
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The threat would soon hit home. The Montgomery bus boycott, galvanized by King's pulpit oratory, was under way and the parsonage was bombed the next year. King's wife, his young daughter and a church member were inside at the time, but all escaped injury. <br>
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Now the white, wooden home on a modest street a few blocks from the Capitol is undergoing a $300,000 renovation to become a living history museum. The project, scheduled for completion in 2004 - a year before the 50th anniversary of the historic boycott will be the latest addition to the Montgomery area's growing number of restored civil rights landmarks. <br>
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``It was the scene of a lot of the hustle and bustle at the height of the civil rights movement,'' said the Rev. Michael Thurman, current pastor at King's old church, now known as the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. <br>
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Thomas McPherson, vice president of the foundation formed a year ago to raise funds for the home's restoration, said the building was still in use as a parsonage until 1994, when the pastor at the time decide to live somewhere else. It has been empty ever since. <br>
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McPherson said the main focus will be to give visitors a feel for the era when the charismatic young pastor from Atlanta wrote sermons in the days before he was catapulted into the international spotlight. <br>
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``We have the desk and the chair he worked in while he lived there,'' McPherson said. <br>
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Plans for the 2,000-square-foot home, which has a four-column porch, hardwood floors and fireplace, include reupholstering much of the original furniture from the King family's bedroom and living room. <br>
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King and his family lived in the home from 1954 to 1960, when the Baptist preacher's oratorical and leadership skills brought the growing movement to a head and he left to become a full-time civil rights organizer. <br>
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The foundation has received a $240,000 community development block grant from the city and $70,000 in donations from members of the church. The Alabama Historical Commission also has contributed $50,000 to the project. <br>
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The home is in a neighborhood known as Centennial Hill, which was developed in the late 1870s and was the first substantial black residential neighborhood in Montgomery. Teachers, ministers, doctors and businessmen made their homes in the neighborhood, which is bordered at one end by historically black Alabama State University. <br>
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``It was our hope the parsonage would become the catalyst around which other buildings in the community would be restored,'' Thurman said. <br>
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Jim Carrier, a writer who has researched a travel book on Southern civil rights landmarks to be published next year, said the restoration of the parsonage is the latest of a number of civil rights-era landmarks to be built or renovated in the Montgomery area in recent years. <br>
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Those include: the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, the starting point for the Selma-to-Montgomery march that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act; the Rosa Parks Museum, opened two years ago at the downtown Montgomery site where Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man inspired the boycott; and plans for a visitor's center at the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center. <br>
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``In a number of years, Montgomery actually will have more civil rights sites to see than any place in the South,'' Carrier said. <br>
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Carrier said there is a thirst for knowledge about the civil rights era and a demand to relive it by touring historic sights throughout the South. Even the remote, unmarked spot on a country road in Mississippi where three young civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 gets bus tours, he said. <br>
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As the 50th anniversary of the bus boycott nears - along with the completion of civil rights projects - Carrier said Montgomery and its landmarks will get a lot more attention from around the country. <br>
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``Right now visitors can see what there is to see in about an hour,'' he said. ``But when you open three or four different museums and centers ... I think we're going to see people from all over the world."
