**Birmingham Historical Society**

**APPLICATION FOR INCLUSION OF A PROPERTY**

**IN THE U.S. WORLD HERITAGE TENTATIVE LIST**

**Birmingham\'s Civil Rights Churches**

**Edited Text and Supplemental Copy**

**I. EDITED TEXT FROM THE ORIGINAL SUBMISSION**

**5. c. Means of implementing protective measures**

**5.e. Property management plan or other management system**

**II. SUPPLEMENTAL COPY SUBMITTED IN RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS**

**1. Further Explanation as to Changes to the 16th Street Church** *(See
also additional photographs submitted on disc and in paper drafts to
April Brooks by FedEx and received by J. Lee, 7:45 a.m. June 26, 2007.)*

**2. Civil Rights Sites in the Southern United States by Glenn Eskew**

**Brief Description**

**Justification for Inscription**

**Background Justification**

**Context Statement**

**Conclusion**

**List of Potential Civil Rights Sites in the Southern United States**

**3. Another Attempt to Address World Heritage Criteria ii & vi**

**Brief Description**

**Justification for Inscription**

**\
**

**I. EDITED TEXT FROM THE ORIGINAL SUBMISSION**

**5. c. Means of implementing protective measures**

The owner(s) will be responsible for ensuring that the nominated
properties will be protected in perpetuity. The Alabama Historical
Commission, through the Easements, accepts responsibility to enforce the
easements.

YES: \_\_\_\_X\_\_\_\_\_ NO: \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_

What is the adequacy of resources available for this purpose?

Both churches have set up private foundations to receive tax deductible
contributions. National Historic Landmark and World Heritage designation
will help them raise funds.

**5.e. Property management plan or other management system**

YES: \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ NO: \_\_\_\_X\_\_\_\_

Comment: Neither Bethel nor 16th Street have what the National Park
Service would term a management plan; they do have management systems by
which certain trustee volunteers and hired contractors supervise the
physical facilities of both churches.

**\
**

**II. SUPPLEMENTAL COPY SUBMITTED IN RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS**

**1. Further Explanation as to Changes to the 16th Street Church** *(See
also additional photographs submitted on disc and in paper drafts to
April Brooks by FedEx and received by Lee.)*

There have been three major periods of construction at the 16th Street
Church following initial construction in 1911: 1963-63, following the
September 15, 1963 bombing; 1991-1992, to prepare the church for
visitors as the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute opened and Kelley
Ingram Park was improved; and 2006-2007 to seal the exterior envelop of
the church from water penetration and restore to a great degree the 1963
appearance.

The 1963-1964 renovations following the 1963 bombing of the church
included repairs to the structure necessitated by the bomb blast and
other changes. The bomb was placed under then extant stairs to a landing
at the sanctuary level located at the north end of the 16th Street
elevation. (See photographs 11 and 17.) The stairs were destroyed
together with first story foundations, a window and sill which imploded
into the Women\'s Restroom killing the four children. Sanctuary level
windows and frames in the last four bays were destroyed and others
damaged. A new rear entrance was created at ground level, the restroom
location moved and sanctuary and basement windows, sills and frames
repaired or replicated to match originals. On the front elevation, metal
awnings over the first story entrances that flank the central stairs
were removed and replaced with street level vestibules that provide
fortress-like transitions from 6th Avenue, effective barriers to the
water from the firemen\'s hoses which had flooded the 16th Street Church
during the marches and demonstrations of spring 1963.

As contributions to the rebuilding were received from people around the
globe, the church made other changes at this time include the
partitioning of the first floor fellowship hall to create the memorial
nook and Sunday school rooms along the east and west perimeters. In the
sanctuary, the face of the pulpit area and balcony and the wainscot of
the perimeter walls were covered with a flush oak paneling and a new
pulpit installed (The original pulpit having disappeared during the 1963
construction). The skylight over the pulpit and baptismal was covered.
Doors were added at the north wall of the east and west sides of the
balcony. In 1965, the Wales Window commemorating the bombing was added
to replace an original window of the main, 6th Avenue, south elevation
(See photograph 18: the title sheet of the HABS documentation).

In 1991-1992, rehabilitation to the sanctuary interior included adding
new heat, air-conditioning, wiring and sound systems, carpeting and
upholstering of the original pews, rebuilding and enlarging the pulpit
area and baptismal, restoring the pipe organ, and adding a glass barrier
and brass rail to the face of the balcony . On the exterior, the front
steps of the church were covered with glazed quarry tile, an elevator
added in the southwest tower, and new brick pavers replacing the
original sidewalk. The HABS drawings and photographs made in 1993 record
the 1963-4 and 1991-1992 changes (See photographs 18-24). The *Historic
Structures Report* of 2005 documents the changes made to the historic
structure and includes historic and 2005 photographs and extensive
verbal description.

From 2006 to 2007, an exterior stabilization campaign has sealed the
exterior envelop form water penetration. Roofs, mortar, and subsoil
conditions were repaired. The glazed quarry tile applied to the front
steps in 1991-1992 was removed. With the exception of the vestibules and
the rear entrance along 16th Street added in 1933-64, the exterior was
restored to its 1963 Movement era condition.

**2. CIVIL RIGHTS SITES IN THE SOUTHERN UNITED STATES** by Glenn Eskew

**Brief Description**

These civil rights sites are associated with the protest movement of the
1950s and 1960s that dismantled legal segregation in America. Dexter
Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama and Bethel
Baptist and Sixteenth Street Baptist Churches in Birmingham, Alabama
served as centers for the civil rights struggle. At these churches and
similar centers and public spaces, citizens organized nonviolent
demonstrations challenging racial segregation and inequality, ultimately
opening the American way of life to all citizens.

**Justification for Inscription**

ii *Exhibit an important interchange of human values within a cultural
area of the world on developments in town planning and landscape
design.*

*vi Be directly associated with events and ideas of outstanding
universal significance.*

Fulfilling the requirements for criteria (ii) and (vi), these civil
rights sites mark the interchange of nonviolent demands for equality
with those defending unequal, separate spaces and second class
citizenship for minorities within the American South. This interchange
resulted in the dismantling of legal segregation in town planning and
the redesign of landscapes into racially integrated environments
accessible to all. The American civil rights movement signified a clear
break with traditional human values that separated public space by race,
ethnicity, religion, caste, and gender. As a result of events in
Montgomery, Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, Memphis, and elsewhere,
federally mandated integration replaced local practices of legalized
segregation across the United States. Legally ending racially separated
neighborhoods and schools and removing structural barriers that had
separated the races in public spaces, altered town planning and
landscape design across America. This dramatic change reflects the power
of nonviolent demonstrators to change human values as required by
criteria (ii). The civil rights movement inspired oppressed people
around the world thereby making Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist
Church, Bethel Baptist Church, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and other
such sites of outstanding universal value, for they remain irreplaceable
sources of inspiration for everyone to use nonviolence against state
oppression to gain greater use of the public space and individual
freedom. As these American civil rights sites attest to the thousands
who visit them annually, they are of outstanding universal value, for
they bear unique testimony to the modern human rights movement and
thereby clearly justify inscription under cultural criteria (vi).

**Background Justification**

Throughout history, people have fought for equal treatment and fair
access to society with demonstrations for justice like streams joining a
mighty river, feeding and inspiring the whole course of human events.
Yet humanity has maintained oppressive regimes designed to reinforce
inequality and injustice. Since ancient times most cultures have
subscribed to patterns of spatial separation, dividing the population
along ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural lines as expressed in the
built environment. Traditional patterns of town planning and landscape
design feature segregated spaces: men from women, ethnic group from
ethnic group, religion from religion, class from class. Even
international cities often maintained ghettos reserved for outsiders who
were not accepted as part of the indigenous population. Whether by
custom or law, the peoples of the world have traditionally emphasized
differences. And yet throughout history individuals have challenged
these customs of separation as when the Biblical Jesus rejected such
notions of division by treating other ethnic groups, women, and social
outcasts as equals when he met them in public or private spaces. The
birth of the modern industrialized world reinforced traditional
practices of separation by adopting new laws that formalized
segregation. Carried from the metropolis, these laws found practice in
colonial outposts of European powers around the globe with the
designation of the landscape as "white" or "colored." Following the
United States Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in [Plessy]{.underline} v.
[Ferguson,]{.underline} "separate but equal" became the law of the land
as racial proscriptions remade town planning through racially zoned
neighborhoods, racially segregated schools, and the clear demarcation of
"white" and "colored" public spaces. Similar racist practices in South
Africa resulted in a legal strategy of apartness known as "apartheid"
that---carried to its illogical end---created fictional racial homelands
as a way of designating separate spaces to reinforce white supremacy.
Segregation found its most extreme expression in Nazi Germany in the
1930s where Jews---separated into ghettos---were forced into
concentration camps where they joined Gypsies, gays and lesbians, the
handicapped, political dissidents, and other people deemed unfit to live
in the Third Reich and were often exterminated during the Holocaust.

Independence movements throughout the world and especially in colonial
Africa after the Second World War encouraged black Americans to protest
for their civil rights. Just as the World Heritage Site of Elmina
Castle, where slaves left the shores of Africa bounded for the Americas,
links the two continents in silent witness to human tragedy, so too, the
nonviolent transition of power from the British Gold Coast to the
independent Ghana in 1957 led by Kwame Nkrumah paralleled the American
civil rights movement and underscored a pan-African desire to end
colonial segregation and gain equal access to the wealth of the world.

**Context Statement**

From his pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Reverend Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., led the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first
community-based protest in the United States South that garnered
international acclaim. Other Alabama grassroots leaders, tired of the
demeaning racial proscriptions that segregated spaces reinforced, rose
up in protest over separate and unequal seating on public accommodations
in December 1955. The instigator Rosa Parks explained her civil
disobedience was designed to find out "what rights I had as a human
being and a citizen." These black activists selected King to lead the
boycott and consequently his church and home were targeted by white
vigilantes determined to maintain segregation. In December 1956 the
United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating in local
public transportation was unconstitutional, thereby ordering these
spaces be integrated.

The Supreme Court's decision harkened back to its [Brown]{.underline} v.
[Board of Education]{.underline} ruling of May 1954 which declared that
racially segregated schools were separate and unequal and therefore
unconstitutional. This and other rulings derived from test cases filed
by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) on behalf of local plaintiffs in communities such as Topeka,
Kansas, where black children faced discrimination through racially
segregated public education. In 1957 such a case demanding enforcement
of the ruling resulted in the federally forced integration of Central
High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. White opposition known
collectively as "Massive Resistance" organized to protect segregated
spaces by closing them to all races, but this strategy---which hurt both
black and white people---failed in the end to maintain racial
segregation. Other protest groups challenged the legal racial separation
enforced at lunch counters and restaurants through the sit-in movement
of the 1960s. By 1961 a group of black and white demonstrators organized
the Freedom Ride as a way to confront segregated spaces in public
accommodations. These protests embraced civil disobedience and
nonviolent resistance as human values in an interchange with a
traditional status quo determined to maintain racial separation through
the legal system of segregation.

Encouraged by disciples of nonviolence, Martin King traveled to India
where he studied the successes of the great Mahatma Gandhi and his
teachings of *satyagraha*. Bringing those human values back to Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church, King interpreted them through the lens of
Christian theology, expressing what has been called "Kingian
nonviolence." King traveled to Africa where he witnessed decolonization
with the birth of Ghana in 1957. He shared these teachings with the Rev.
Fred L. Shuttlesworth of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham who had
joined in the bus boycott in Montgomery and became one of King's close
associates when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
formed in January of 1957. Shuttlesworth invited King and the SCLC to
join him and his local civil rights organization, the Alabama Christian
Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), for a joint SCLC-ACMHR campaign
against segregation in Birmingham in the spring of 1963. Among the
meeting places used during the April-May 1963 campaign was the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church. As demonstrated by King and Shuttlesworth, the
American civil rights struggle interpreted Gandhi's *satyagraha* in its
own fashion as a unifying theme most successfully implemented in the
streets of Birmingham in 1963 when thousands marches for freedom.

From the sanctuaries of Bethel and Sixteenth Street Baptist Churches in
Birmingham, Alabama civil rights movement volunteers determined to end
racial discrimination and segregation in America marched down the steps
and into history at the forefront of the universal struggle for human
rights in the 1960s. By forcing the United States Government to address
race reform and end legal separation, these nonviolent black activists
provoked the climax of the southern civil rights struggle, making these
two churches as central to the American master narrative as World
Heritage Site Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where the
country's founders debated the true meaning of liberty. The victory won
in Birmingham resolved for once and for all that understanding of
freedom by opening up the American system to minorities (African
Americans at first, then Latinos, Native Americans, the handicapped,
gays and lesbians) and women as henceforth the federal government
opposed as official policy the racial discrimination and gender
inequality that routinely had been applied previously to these citizens.
For the world, Birmingham became both a symbol of the failure of the
United States to live up to its American Dream and a vision of how
nonviolence can force a so-called democracy to expand and become truly
inclusive. Because of Birmingham's protest movement that was organized
in Bethel Baptist Church and that poured out of the doors of Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church, the Administration of President John Kennedy
proposed sweeping legislation that passed as the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
setting in place mechanisms that ended segregation in public spaces and
initiated fair employment practices. The civil rights demonstrators who
left Selma, Alabama\'s Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church
and First Baptist Church and crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge to
confront Alabama State Troopers on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, set in
motion the Selma to Montgomery March that forced the United States
Congress to adopt the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This act led to black
political empowerment and also helped all Americans gain first class
citizenship. As President Lyndon B. Johnson declared in a televised
address, a week after Bloody Sunday, America "must overcome the
crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice, and we shall overcome."
Indeed the indigenous demands to end racial discrimination created what
civil rights historian Hugh Davis Graham has called the \"American
Rights Revolution.\" Internationally that movement spread as the
American civil rights struggle joined a "rights revolution" across the
globe.

Media played a key role in undermining racial segregation and
discrimination in the South by broadcasting to the world injustices in
the United States. Reporters marveled over the ability of black
residents in Montgomery to stay off the public transit system for a year
and walk to work, continuing the boycott and pressure on city leaders.
Journalists captured the images of Birmingham's firemen blasting black
school children with water under pressure strong enough to tear the bark
from trees and policemen urging their dogs on nonviolent bystanders
watching the protests. A network broadcast of the film [Judgment at
Nuremburg]{.underline} was interrupted to show footage of Alabama State
Troopers beating nonviolent demonstrators in Selma. In the geopolitical
struggle between superpowers, a chagrined President John F. Kennedy
understood the implications of political cartoons in Russia's newspaper
[Pravda]{.underline} that mockingly depicted the hypocrisy of white
supremacists in Alabama defending American freedoms from black youth.
The power of newspaper coverage and the emerging television broadcasts
made the earth smaller as "the world is watching" events in Alabama or
as sociologist Marshall McLuhan later described it, life in a global
village. Indeed, within days of the Birmingham protests of 1963, a
Buddhist monk in South Vietnam, perhaps aware of the state violence
against black youth in America and recognizing the power of media
images, calmly assumed the lotus position on a busy street corner in
Saigon, soaked his saffron robes in gasoline and struck a match, a self
sacrifice through immolation, protesting a United States sponsored
dictator's brutal suppression of freedom of religion. Throughout the
world, human rights activists realized the shared nature of their
freedom struggles as they used nonviolence to confront an oppressive
status quo in conflicts waged in public spaces.

The clearest contemporary parallel to the American civil rights movement
was the fight against apartheid in the Republic of South Africa. White
supremacist Afrikaners in the National Party who had won control of the
country in 1948, formalized a series of segregation laws that as
apartheid---or separateness---created a racially segregated society.
South Africans opposed to racial discrimination organized the
multiracial African National Congress (ANC) and adopted the Freedom
Charter to fight against apartheid. Others took to the streets
protesting pass laws that created segregated homelands. In March 1960 at
Sharpeville police opened fire on demonstrators shooting in the back and
killing 67 people and wounding dozens more. The white supremacist state
cracked down as thousands of protesters around the country demonstrated,
ultimately leading to the arrest in 1962 of ANC leaders such as
President Nelson Mandela, who was banned from being quoted and
imprisoned for 27 years, spending much of that time isolated in a small
cell on windswept Robben Island. This World Heritage Site includes the
jail that housed Mandela and his ANC comrades, a facility not unlike
that in Birmingham where King sat imprisoned in 1963 while thousands met
in Sixteenth Street and Bethel Baptist Churches in mass meetings and
hundreds more marched in protest. In his cell at the Birmingham jail,
Martin King wrote his "Letter From Birmingham Jail" which once smuggled
out and published became the clearest expression of the goals and
aspirations of the American civil rights movement. Likewise in his cell
outside Cape Town, Nelson Mandela penned his "Autobiography" that an
associate slipped out of the country in 1976. Later published it told
the world about the South African freedom struggle.

The exercises in civil disobedience, boycotts, and protest marches
Gandhi led in British controlled India before independence developed in
part out of nonviolent demonstrations he had waged decades before in
South Africa. Gandhi's imprisonment, like that of Mandela's and King's,
galvanized opposition against unjust governments, and legitimated
nonviolence as a strategy of the oppressed. Similarly the false
imprisonment and then disappearance of up to 30,000 people who
authorities in Argentina snatched off public streets, detained,
murdered, and disposed of secretly during the so-called "Dirty War" from
1976 to 1983, provoked a nonviolent response by thousands of
grandmothers who, wearing white diapers as headscarves and carrying
photographs of their missing children, gathered weekly in Buenos Aires'
Plaza de Mayo in silent witness to the atrocities of state violence,
ultimately helping to topple a discredited regime. Across the world
thousands of Filipinos used "People Power" to confront the tanks of a
ruthless dictator in 1986 as nonviolent protest secured the democratic
election of Corazon Aquino as president of the Philippines. Likewise the
thousands of Germans, converging on either side of the Berlin Wall near
the Brandenburg Gate on November 9, 1989, nonviolently protesting the
Communist regimes that had erected the barrier twenty years before, sang
the American civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" as they tore
through the reinforced concrete and reunited East and West Germany.
These demonstrations, like earlier ones by Solidarity in Gdansk, Poland
or the thousands of protesters who gathered in St. Wenceslas Square in
Prague and ushered in the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia reflected
an interchange in public spaces of nonviolent values against state
oppression designed to gain greater individual freedoms.

**Conclusion**

Centuries ago at today's World Heritage Site in Wittenberg, Germany, a
young priest named Martin Luther nailed his famous "95 Theses" on the
door of the castle church, protesting the abuse of indulgences within
the Catholic Church and initiating the Protestant Reformation. Likewise
these civil rights sites in the Southern United States are centers of
the protest movement of the 1950s and 1960s against racial
discrimination, a nonviolent movement that dismantled legal segregation
in America. Fulfilling the requirements for criteria (ii) and (vi),
these sites mark the interchange of nonviolent demands for racial
integration with those defending unequal, separate spaces and second
class citizenship for minorities. The interchange resulted in the
dismantling of legal segregation in town planning and the redesign of
American landscapes into racially integrated environments accessible to
all. These American civil rights sites join a universal campaign for
human rights that builds on struggles, such as those waged in British
India and colonial Africa, through which everyday people turned ordinary
spaces such as the three Alabama churches: Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
in Montgomery and Bethel and Sixteenth Street Baptist Churches in
Birmingham into extraordinary places of outstanding universal value that
bear unique testimony to the advancement of human rights and thereby
qualify them for listing as World Heritage Sites.

**List of Potential Civil Rights Sites in the Southern United States**

**Schools**

Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, Topeka, Kansas

Central High School National Historic Site, Little Rock, Arkansas

**Churches**

Bethel Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama

Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama

Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia

16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama

**Demonstration Sites**

Sites in and near the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail,
including Brown Chapel AME Church, First Baptist Church, Selma, and the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama

Mason Temple, Church of God in Christ, Memphis, Tennessee

Lorraine Hotel, Memphis, Tennessee

**3. Another Attempt to Respond to the World Heritage Criteria ii & vi**

**Brief Description**

Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Bethel Baptist
Church and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama: these
three African American churches were at the center of the struggle for
civil rights in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. Their
courageous congregations and preachers led the battles to dismantle the
segregation of human beings that resulted in inequality at law and in
fact. Their weapon in these battles was nonviolent civil disobedience
grounded in Jesus\' injunction to \"love thy enemy\" and Gandhi\'s
concept of satayagraha (\"vindication of truth not by infliction of
suffering on the opponent but on one's self\"). They, and their friends
and colleagues, offered their lives and worldly goods to the cause, and
too many of them paid the ultimate sacrifice. Their efforts dismantled
legal segregation in America.

**Justification for Inscription**

*ii. Exhibit an important interchange of human values within a cultural
area of the world on developments in town-planning and landscape
design.*

*vi. Be directly associated with events and ideas of outstanding
universal significance**.***

In 1950, a rigid segregation of the races in the American South was
mandated by law and rationalized under the equal protection clause of
the Constitution as requiring separate but not unequal treatment, and
manifested in the rigid division of the races in the places where they
lived, the jobs that they held, the water that they drank and the
restaurants and counters where they ate. There were separate education
systems, separate wards in the hospitals where children were born and
separate funeral homes where they were prepared for burial. In truth
separate was in fact unequal and destined to remain so absent a
revolution of values.

World War II demonstrated that African Americans were fully capable of
fighting and dying for their country, and this embarrassing realization
motivated the integration of the armed forces. In [Brown v. Board of
Education]{.underline} the Supreme Court held that separate was
inherently unequal, but then decided that its ruling would be enforced
with \"deliberate speed.\" Deliberate seemed mighty slow. Onto this
stage came Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth and their
congregations, friends and colleagues intent on extending civil rights
to every citizen, and quickly.

Their leadership was calculated, but insistent rather than deliberate.
They appealed to universal values and to democratic principles. Their
strategy was the use of nonviolent confrontation, disobedient of
existing law if necessary. They followed Christ\'s example and
Ghandi\'s. They eschewed violence against others, and accepted it as a
necessary sacrifice when directed against them, praising God for
protecting them from exploding bombs and sparing them from permanent
damage from beatings with chains and brass knuckles. They preached these
principles from the pulpits of these three modest churches during mass
meetings full of singing, shouting and joy as well as preaching.