Katie Wilson reads to daughter Claire, 1, about Civil Rights history at the Atlanta History Center on Jan. 20.

Visitors to the Atlanta History Center learned history and made art as they observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 20.

Braydon Anderson holds a button reading “We Shall Overcome” — the title of a gospel song that became a Civil Rights anthem — during an art-making program he joined with his son Arlo, 3, and Emi Wilson, 4.

Among the programming at the museum on West Paces Ferry Road in Buckhead were Civil Rights-related art-making and immersive role-playing as the “Freedom Riders” who challenged segregated bus service in the 1960s.

Shay Stewart performs as Genevieve Hughes Houghton as she leads a group in a re-enactment of the Congress of Racial Equality’s “Freedom Rides” of the 1960s, where black and white Civil Rights activists rode buses together in the South to challenge illegal segregation of riders, and faced violent reactions from police, mobs and the Ku Klux Klan.

Photos by Phil Mosier.

John Ruch is a former journalist who previously served as Managing Editor of Reporter Newspapers.