Under the auspices of the National Park Service is an area of about 2 blocks around Auburn Avenue, designated as a National Historic Site and established to preserve the birthplace and boyhood surroundings of the nation's foremost civil rights leader. It includes King's boyhood home and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King's father and grandfather were ministers and King served as a co-pastor. King is often said to have been the pastor at Ebenezer, but in fact he never held that senior position. Free tours of King's birth home start at Fire Station No. 6, which was recently restored by the NPS; tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis at the National Parks Service Visitor Center, 450 Auburn Ave. Other Auburn Avenue attractions, not under NPS auspices, include the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, where King is buried, and the APEX Museum. Several more surrounding blocks have been designated as a preservation district. This area is known as Sweet Auburn. John Wesley Dobbs, maternal grandfather of former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, is the person who first called it such, after Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, the first line of which reads, "Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plains." Mayor Jackson says his grandfather called the area "sweet" because the keys to black liberation existed here in the form of "the three b's--bucks, ballots, and books."

There is a visitor's center at 450 Auburn Ave., across from the King Center. It provides a complete orientation to area attractions and includes a theater for audiovisual and interpretive programs, interactive exhibits, and a bookstore. The visitors center is fronted by a beautifully landscaped plaza with a reflecting pool, King's crypt, which his wife had returned to the site several years ago, and an outdoor amphitheater for National Park Service programs.