In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, WLA Studio is proud to have had the privilege of working at sites highlighting Dr. and Mrs. King’s lives, including the Birth Home Block at Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, and the King Family Home.

These important sites document the history of the fight for equality and justice, and they provide a framework for future activism, encouraging dialogue about racial and social justice.

As a landscape architecture and preservation planning firm, we often find ourselves working in historic landscapes and historic sites, confronted with the complexities of our collective past and the layers of stories to be told. We believe looking to the past helps contextualize our current situation as we assess our current environment and collectively move forward. In our projects, we have been immersed in the events that shaped our contemporary world—Revolutionary and Civil War sites, Reconstruction Era sites, and Civil Rights sites. In each, we see how our nation has struggled to overcome adversity and worked to find a path forward toward justice and equality. As preservationists, we remain committed to understanding the multiple layers of history. However uncomfortable or unjust some periods appear today, we can contribute to the ongoing conversation about social change and live up to our collective ideas of justice and equality as envisioned by Dr. and Mrs. King. 

Image Credits and Rights: Library of Congress, “MLK and Arnold Michaelis interview raw footage,” Walter Brown Media Archives, WLA Studio