In Birmingham, Alabama, at least 11 churches were established in the 1800s, including St. Paul United Methodist Church (1869) and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (1873). Churches with longevity have mastered a formula: they fill community needs and are fortified with strong leadership, say church historians.
This study attempts to fill a gap in the historiography of the African American church by analyzing the role and place of the African American church in one city, Birmingham, Alabama. It traces the roles and functions of the church from the arrival of African Americans as slaves in the early 1800s to 1963, the year that the civil rights movement reached a peak in the city.
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama
Early Foundations and Growth
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was organized as the First Colored Baptist Church of Birmingham, the first black church to organize in Birmingham. Sixth Avenue Baptist Church was founded in 1881 as the Second Colored Baptist Church. The first congregation that would become First Baptist Church Montgomery organized in 1866. The former slaves had worshipped at the White First Baptist Church in Montgomery, before the Civil War ended. They had to sit in the balcony.
But in 1867, about 700 African Americans marched to an empty lot on the corner of Ripley Street and Columbus Street. There, they started Columbus Street Baptist Church, “the first ‘free Negro’ institution in Montgomery.” The first pastor was Nathan Ashby, who also became the first president of the Colored Baptist Convention in Alabama, founded in his church on December 17, 1868.
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The church was founded in 1882 and originally operated in a vacant store on 4th Avenue between 16th and 17th Streets North. Churches located in robust communities often are able to survive, while others may fall by the wayside.
How Did The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Affect The City Of Birmingham?
Factors Influencing Church Longevity
“Many of the older churches, such as Sixth Avenue Baptist and Sixteenth Street Baptist, have had strong continuous leadership,” said the Rev. Dr. Wilson Fallin, president of Easonian Baptist Bible College in Powderly. Fallin, who also is a professor of history at the University of Montevallo, explained that churches located in robust communities often are able to survive, while others may fall by the wayside. “Churches have gone out of existence because their surrounding communities have deteriorated,” said Fallin.
Historian Wayne Flynt, a retired professor and history department chairman at Auburn University, said churches are formed not just because of theology but also because of sociology. “Churches form themselves around doctrine, and churches form themselves around sociology,” said Flynt. Churches can sometimes be divided between family churches and community churches, he said, citing research by Troy Morrison, the former executive secretary of the Alabama Baptist State Convention.
“[A family church may have] 300 members, but there are two or three or four patriarchs and matriarchs who will decide [the pastor’s] fate at any given time,” Flynt said. Also, Fallin pointed out, many long-lived churches are static in growth and experience declines in membership. The most robust and resilient churches still fill community needs, much like houses of worship did following the demise of slavery in the United States, observers say.
During that period, African-American churches took on roles as self-help institutions that aided the sick, ran burial societies to raise money for funeral expenses, and even started schools and banks. “They give hope and self-esteem.
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Sixteenth Street Baptist Church: A Beacon of Hope and Resilience
Organized in 1873 as the First Colored Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama. Sixteenth Street was the first black church in Birmingham.
Initially, the congregation worshiped in a small building on the corner of 12th Street North and 4th Avenue and later moved to 3rd Avenue North between 19th and 20th Streets.In 1880 the congregation moved to its present location at 16th Street and 6th Avenue North. A modern brick building was erected in 1884 that established precedence for church building in the city.
Ordered by the City of Birmingham to tear down its building, the church officials commissioned Mr. Wallace Rayfield, the state’s only Black architect, to design a new church building. A native of Macon, Georgia, Mr. Rayfield had been raised in Washington, D.C. He received his education at Howard University, Washington, D.C. and Pratt Institute in New York City. The church, designed by him, was built at a cost of $26,000.00 under the supervision of T.C. Windham, a black contractor from Birmingham. Mr. Windham was a member and served, for a period, as Chairman of the church’s Trustee Board.
The present building was completed in 1911. As one of the primary institutions in the black community, the 16th Street Baptist Church has hosted prominent visitors throughout its history. W. E. B. The Wales Window for Alabama donated by the people of Wales after the 1963 bombing of the church.
The south-facing window was designed by Welsh artist John Petts and depicts a black Jesus with his arms outstretched. The right hand symbolizes oppression, his left is asking for forgiveness.
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The Wales Window for Alabama
Role in the Civil Rights Movement
Due to Sixteenth Street’s prominence in the black community, and its central location to downtown Birmingham, the church served as headquarters for the civil rights mass meetings and rallies in the early 1960’s.
During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the 16th Street Baptist Church served as an organizational headquarters, site of mass meetings and rallying point for African Americans protesting widespread institutionalized racism in Birmingham, Alabama, and the South.
The mass meetings held in Sixteenth Street, and in many other churches in Birmingham in May of 1963, resulted in marches and demonstrations that produced police retaliation and brutality, still painful to the memory of all who lived in the city and millions, who saw it reported on national TV news casts. Most of the marchers were school children and several thousand were arrested. Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth provided inspirational leadership to the marchers during this chaotic time.
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, Thomas Blanton, Bobby Frank Cherry and Robert Edward Chambliss, members of the Ku Klux Klan, planted 19 sticks of dynamite outside the basement of the church. They were there preparing for the church's "Youth Day". This was one of a string of more than 45 bombings within the decade. Twenty-two other victims suffered injuries. The neighborhood of Dynamite Hill was the most-frequently targeted area during this time.
It was 18 days after the march on Washington, after Dr. King said he had a dream, that the response in Birmingham was to bomb the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church because it was deemed to be the epicenter of the mass movements during that time. On September 15th, 1963, a bomb went off right after the Sunday school hour. The Sunday school lesson that day was a love that forgives. Four girls lost their lives. A fifth girl in the bathroom was blinded in one eye. That bombing galvanized a generation, so much so that the leaders during that time wanted to make sure that their deaths were not in vain.
Later that same evening, in different parts of town, a black youth was killed by police and one was murdered by a mob of white men. It was a shocking, terrifying day in the history of Birmingham and a day that forced white leaders to further come to grips with the city’s bitter racist reputation.
Aftermath and Legacy
The tragedy of that Sunday produced outpourings of sympathy, concern and financial contributions from all parts of the world. More than $300,000.00 was contributed for the restoration of the damaged church. It was reopened for services Sunday, June 7, 1964.
The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church increased Federal involvement in Alabama. Following the bombing, more than $300,000 in unsolicited gifts were received by the church and repairs were begun immediately. The church reopened on June 7, 1964.
The church was added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage on June 16, 1976. On September 17, 1980, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 1993, a team of surveyors for the Historic American Buildings Survey executed archival quality measured drawings of the church for the Library of Congress. Because of its historic value on a national level in the moral crusade of civil rights, the church was officially designated a National Historic Landmark on February 20, 2006, by the United States Department of the Interior.
The 16th Street Baptist Church engaged in a $3 million restoration of the building in the first decade of the 21st century. Persistent water damage problems and exterior brick facing failure were addressed. The first phase of restoration, mainly below-grade waterproofing, was completed in 2007, followed by work on the exterior masonry.
As part of the Birmingham Civil Rights District, the 16th Street Baptist Church receives more than 200,000 visitors annually. Though the current membership is only around 500, it has an average weekly attendance of nearly 2,000. The church also operates a large drug counseling program. The current pastor is the Reverend Arthur Price.
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church holds a profound place in American history. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is the oldest African American Baptist church in Birmingham proper. It was organized in 1873, ten years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Lincoln. What makes our church significant is that W.A. Rayfield, the second licensed African American architect in the country, designed the church. It was designed by a Black man. It was built by a Black building company and paid for by Black people.
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had a dual role in the Jim Crow South. It was a place of spiritual formation and a place of social recreation because you couldn't go to a lyric theater or an Alabama theater or a Birmingham Convention Center. They had to bring people to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in order to hear them. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Marian Anderson, Ralph Bunche, Paul Robeson, and Jackie Robinson all spoke there. The list goes on and on. The most noted speaker is, of course, the Reverend Dr.
The challenge is always how to juxtapose ministry versus museum, to get people to see Sixteenth Street Baptist Church as a living ministry and not just a relic from the past that you come and pay homage to and leave. The other challenge is that we have a very old building that needs a lot of love and care. Our congregation is not a very large congregation- we have less than 500 members-but I say we have a mega ministry because of the eyes that are on us and the tens of thousands of people that come to see us. We have a mega ministry that does not just reach the Birmingham community, but also the global community, so the challenge is to make sure that the church never gets into a place where we defer maintenance.
With our preservationists, architects, and other partners, we were intentional in how we design the experience that you're going to have. When we talk about partnerships, we’re talking about the Civil Rights Institute, the National Park Service, the National Trust-but we’re also talking about our educational systems. People see the Church as the community's church, and they have buy-in on preserving it because they want to make sure that this church stands for generations to come.
First Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL
The Enduring Impact
Rewarding for me personally is seeing the interest that so many people still have in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church-not only just coming to the Church to learn about Dr. King, Dr. Shuttlesworth, or the four little girls, but coming to the Church for worship. It could be easy to say, you know what? We'll close our doors, make this church a museum, and we could build another structure of worship. But to have this building still standing after all these years and still do what it was set out to do? The resilience that the church had through all these years is remarkable. We've been around for 151 years.
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and St. Paul United Methodist Church are within the boundaries of Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, but are not owned or operated by the National Park Service. Contact the churches directly for tours. Historic Bethel Baptist Church was connected to the Civil Rights Movement through the work of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Historic Bethel Baptist Church is mentioned in the proclamation establishing the monument, laying the basis for partnership and interpretation, and possible later inclusion in the national monument. The church is located six miles from the A.G. Gaston Motel and the other historic properties in downtown Birmingham.
Churches were one of the few places people could meet in large numbers under Jim Crow Laws. People could organize, discuss, and gather for protests as part of the Civil Rights Movement.
