Ebenezer Baptist Church

Overview

Ebenezer Baptist Church, founded in 1886 in Atlanta, Georgia, by Pastor John A. Parker and eight congregants, grew from a tiny founding membership into one of the most historically significant Black churches in the United States — the spiritual and organizing home of the Martin Luther King family across three generations. Adam Daniel Williams, Martin Luther King Jr.’s maternal grandfather, became pastor in 1894 when the church had just 13 members; by 1903 it had grown to 400, and by 1913 to 750, a growth trajectory that tracks Atlanta’s own growing Black community in the decades after Reconstruction.

The King Family and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Martin Luther King Sr. became assistant pastor in 1927 and senior pastor in 1931, and in 1960 his son, Martin Luther King Jr., became co-pastor alongside him, a role King Jr. held until his assassination in 1968; a third generation, Alfred Daniel King, served as co-pastor from 1968 until his own death in 1969. In 1957, Ebenezer hosted a pivotal meeting of Baptist leaders at King Jr.’s invitation that directly resulted in the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the central organizing bodies of the Civil Rights Movement covered elsewhere on this site — meaning the strategic infrastructure of the movement’s Southern organizing was built, in significant part, inside this one Atlanta sanctuary.

A Pastor Who Became a Senator

Since 2005, Ebenezer’s senior pastor has been Raphael Warnock, only the fifth person to hold that role since the church’s founding, and in January 2021 Warnock defeated incumbent Kelly Loeffler in a special runoff election, becoming the first Black senator in Georgia’s history; in December 2022 he won a full six-year term, becoming the first Black Georgian ever elected to one. Ebenezer’s sanctuary has hosted the funerals of Martin Luther King Jr., his father Martin Luther King Sr., congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, and, in 2020, Rayshard Brooks, whose killing by Atlanta police became a flashpoint in that year’s protests — a continuous, documented thread of the church standing at the center of both civil rights history and its ongoing present.

Legacy

Ebenezer continues its tradition of politically engaged Black religious leadership today, with a congregation of roughly 6,000 members as of 2021, and the church’s historic building now sits within the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, formally recognizing its place at the center of the movement it helped organize and sustain nearly a century and a half after eight founding members first gathered to worship together.