"On a map, the churches are separated only by a few miles of gray interstate highway. But in reality, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in suburban Lithonia [Ga.] and Ebenezer Baptist Church in the historic Sweet Auburn section of Atlanta are worlds apart.

Ebenezer, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was eulogized in 1968, is surrounded by a sickly cluster of rib shacks, barber shops and billiard halls that time seemingly forgot. The area is nothing like the thriving black community it was many years ago.

New Birth, the site of Coretta Scott King's funeral Tuesday, sits on prime real estate in southern DeKalb County, once a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan and now the second-richest black suburb, after Maryland's Prince George's County. Black professionals, entrepreneurs and entertainers live in houses that the Kings could have only dreamed of as they led the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

The two churches stand like symbolic bookends of the era that began with King's assassination. The story of their differing landscapes is, in many ways, the story of black America's transformation after the movement, highlighting the themes of increased suburbanization, heightened prosperity and abandonment of the inner cities.

'Atlanta has become a magnet for the beneficiaries of the civil rights movement, and those are the folks who attend New Birth,' said Michael Lomax, president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund and a former commissioner of Fulton County, which covers part of Atlanta.

'I do think that south DeKalb does not acknowledge perhaps the people who were most on Dr. King's mind at the time of his death, and that is the poor,' he said. 'Those are the people on Auburn Avenue and Ebenezer.'

By no means is Ebenezer being completely left out of this week's tributes to Coretta Scott King, who attended the church for several decades after her husband's death. While Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer, said he had hoped to eulogize King, who died Jan. 30 at age 78, his church did host a musical tribute and a second viewing of her body on Monday.

As on Saturday, when her open casket lay in state at the Georgia Capitol, hundreds of people lined up in the rain to see her. Oprah Winfrey and Gladys Knight were among those who paid their respects. Across the street, guest singers and choirs raised their voices in tribute, their sounds vibrating through the pews.

'She leaves us all a better America than the America of her childhood,' Winfrey told the mourners.

Still, the decision by the King children -- Yolanda, Martin Luther III, Dexter and Bernice -- to hold their mother's funeral service outside Atlanta rankled a few members of the civil rights establishment for several reasons.

Coretta King recently spoke out for gay rights, at the very time that the pastor of New Birth, Bishop Eddie L. Long, was marching against same-sex marriage and benefits to gay partners. She was one of a few black civil rights leaders who said the gay rights struggle compared somewhat to the civil rights struggle.

Across Sweet Auburn, people said they understood why the family chose the 10,000-seat mega-church in south DeKalb over the 2,700-seat double sanctuaries of Ebenezer. 'I don't see nothing wrong with it,' said Augustus Jordan, 82, a barber at the Silver Star shop who said he used to cut Martin Luther King Jr.'s hair.

'They don't have no church down here on Auburn that large,' he said. 'People all across this country should appreciate what she's done.'

As a figure in the civil rights movement, Coretta Scott King in some measure helped bring about the metamorphosis of DeKalb County. With new housing-discrimination laws; better educational opportunities; and one of the most ambitious affirmative action programs in the country, which steered many lucrative city and airport contracts to minorities, a growing number of prosperous black people from Atlanta and beyond were able and willing to move to the southern suburbs in DeKalb, where a great monument to Confederate heroes was carved into Stone Mountain.

By 1990, DeKalb's black population was 230,000, about 50,000 less than the white population. Over the next 10 years, the black population exploded to 360,000 as the white population fell to 238,000.

And unlike in black migrations within the city limits, black suburbanites drove income levels and property values up as white people moved out. Residents living in the $500,000 homes and $4 million mansions call themselves Atlantans. But they attended church services in a new congregation that had split from Travelers Rest Baptist Church in 1984 and called itself New Birth.

Now led by Long, it is the size of a mini-mall, with a parking lot to match for its 25,000 members. New Birth is sometimes called a campus, but not because of the nearby charter school. It has its own stadium, practice field, weight room and gymnasium, where a minor-league professional basketball team works out.

'The mega-church is a new thing,' Long said, and 'a lot of times others become intimidated' by the size of the facility. 'What we do at New Birth is make sure that the impact of our ministry is felt right here in Atlanta,' he added.

'We are in the schools; we are not bound by the regulation of separation of church and state. We have a chaplain for all of the high school sports teams. We have purchased uniforms for most of the teams in south DeKalb County, and we are touching people's lives.'

Long, a political independent, has also been one of a number of black ministers who have been actively courted by Republicans. He has met with President Bush, who will be among those attending the funeral Tuesday.

Bernice King, the youngest King sibling, who rested on her mother's lap as she mourned her slain father, drove the decision to hold the service at New Birth. She is a co-pastor there, and in the last years of her life Coretta King attended the church more and more, occasionally speaking there.

In addition to Bush, the funeral service will draw his father, former president George H.W. Bush, as well as former president Bill Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Politicians, dignitaries and entertainers, including Stevie Wonder, are expected to come in droves.

And some of them, if they chose to attend, would not have far to drive.

At Sandstone Estates off Browns Mill Road, about two miles from New Birth, football star Terrell Owens trucked in tons of sand to create a beach on the lake behind his $2 million house.

Two houses away, soul singer Kelly Price played basketball on the full-size court in the back yard of her pricey home to lose weight. Eugenia Neal, who lives in the cul-de-sac community, walked past those homes the other day during her afternoon exercise.

'Every single family here is black,' she said. 'If there's a Caucasian household, I don't know about it.'" (Darryl Fears, The Washington Post, February 7, 2006)