The statue of Martin Luther King Jr. stands in front of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Sturdivant Hall is also known as the Watts-Parkman-Gillman Home.
rights—from Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and the bus stopwhere Rosa Parks defied segregation inMontgomery, to Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church where a bombing killed four girls. Dating back to 1873, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was Birmingham’s first African American church where powerful harmonies of the church’s choir still echo through its spacious nave during Sunday services. The building that stands today, with its cupola and dual towers, was completed in 1911. Since then, it’s been a central meeting place for the city’s black community and thus a key gathering spot during the struggle for civil rights in the early 1960s. Terror and tragedy though thrust the church into world headlines on September 15, 1963, at 10:22 a.m., when a bomb tore through the building killing four young girls attending Sunday school. “The church has always been a leader in the community and during the Civil Rights Movement,” notes McNealy. “And because of that leadership, the Ku Klux Klan targeted the church for a bombing in retaliation for the City of Birmingham integrating its public-school system under court order.” Today, the church offers tours that showcase this tumultuous event and the church’s role in the struggle against segregation and the ongoing quest for civil
rights. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute sits within the heart of the city’s Civil Rights District with permanent and temporary exhibitions that detail past segregation and the fight for equal rights through the most turbulent 1960s. Exhibits include Barriers 1920s - 1950s highlighting how people lived and worked through times of racial divide with examples of segregated lunch counters, high schools, religious sanctuaries, barber shops, and more. Another exhibit is the Movement Gallery with a replica Freedom Riders’ bus. The Freedom Riders included both white and black activists who traveled the South by bus in 1961 to end segregation at bus terminals. The museum’s other not-to-miss highlights include the restored armored personnel police vehicle used by staunch civil rights opponent Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s Commissioner of Public Safety at the time, and the actual door from Martin Luther King Jr.’s jail cell where in 1963 he wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “In his letter, King spoke to the fact that people lived in a ‘tiptoe’ stance, always on guard, never quite knowing from one day to the next what was going to happen,” explains McNealy.
HISTORIC CIVIL RIGHTS TRAIL
COAST TO COAST FALL MAGAZINE 2020
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