The buildings are humble, functional. There are sturdy, redbrick churches and modest houses with deep porches beneath overhangs that ward off the heavy Southern heat. There’s even a barbershop, its row of seats where customers wait like a congregation kneeling before an altar.
Seemingly unremarkable pieces of 20th-century America, these structures are in fact quite the contrary: extraordinary artifacts of the Civil Rights Movement, places where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, where Freedom Riders found shelter from mobs, and where social-justice activists huddled to strategize their nonviolent quest for human rights. More than a dozen such structures in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, have now been placed on the 2018 World Monuments Watch, a biennial list of cultural sites at risk of decay or destruction.
Dr. king leading a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
The World Monuments Fund (WMF), which administers the Watch, is most often associated with preserving places of undisputed beauty, like the Taj Mahal, or archaeological significance, such as Machu Picchu. Indeed, among the 24 other places on the 2018 Watch are a 12th-century minaret in Mosul, Iraq, and the Jewish Quarter in Essaouira, Morocco. Joshua David, WMF’s president and CEO, says the Alabama locations fit into an evolving mission to recognize “places that reflect the most treasured human values.
“We tend to know this part of American history through individuals—Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks—or particular actions, like the voting-rights march and bus boycott,” says David. “We have less of an understanding of the community in which they took place. To see the physical context of these lives and this movement is incredibly engaging and inspiring.”
Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church
Valda Harris Montgomery, daughter of prominent local leader Dr. Richard H. Harris Jr., remembers when King, then the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, moved into the parsonage just doors down from her childhood home in 1954, and when 33 Freedom Riders, protesting segregation on interstate buses,were attacked in 1961. “The National Guard brought them here to our home, all bloodied and beaten,” she says. “My family housed and fed them. My daddy was a pharmacist, so he could provide medicine.”
The young activists stayed for several days, during which King and fellow leaders Ralph Abernathy, James Farmer, John Lewis, and Diane Nash gathered to pray and strategize, eventually deciding to continue with the dangerous mission. The house, the parsonage, and the church are now on the Watch list, as are other churches and houses, in addition to the Ben Moore Hotel, where black travelers found respite at a time when whites-only hotels turned them away.
Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, in Selma.
Several of the sites already have landmark status, but with government funding for preservation uncertain, community organizers hope that the Watch designation will help attract philanthropy. “These sites are very important not just to African-American history but to American history and the history of nonviolent social change,” says Andrea L. Taylor, president and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
The Alabama consortium’s nomination predated the August rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of a counterprotester. But as the nation delves deeper into a debate over the legitimacy of Confederate monuments, it is impossible to ignore the symbolism of the WMF’s memorializing sites where civil-rights crusaders lived and worked. “Even with all the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the legacies of slavery and racism continue to play a definitive role,” David says. “We need to look at all of the sites related to this part of American history—its most troubling and inspirational hours.”
