For decades, visitors have streamed to Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which played a vital role in the Civil Rights Movement and is most known for the 1963 bombing that took the lives of four girls and shocked the world.
An exhibit in its basement details the church’s history, from the congregation’s inception as Birmingham’s first Black church organization in the 1870s through the present day. But church leaders have felt something was missing.
“Once a person fields a tour here, what we've discovered is that we don't have any place for them to stop and reflect,” Terrence Brown said.
Brown is the executive director of the new Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Education and Visitor Center. He said that need to offer space for reflection was the genesis behind the new 13,000-square-foot center that sits on the same block as the church and the parsonage.
The center will hold a ribbon cutting and memorial ceremony on Sept. 15, the 63rd anniversary of the church bombing. Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, will be the keynote speaker. Ahead of that opening, WBHM received a preview tour of the new space.
Symbolic features
Brown served as tour guide and wore a crisp white shirt and red-and-blue bowtie, exuding the energy of a history teacher who makes his students understand the saying that the past is present.
Brown said it’s a space for guests to apply positive lessons after touring the church basement, learning about the church’s past and about the four girls – Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley – who died when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the building.
In the center’s lobby, light streams through expansive windows beneath a soaring ceiling. This and many other features are emblematic of the center’s themes.
“There's so much glass in this place, and so you see the rising of the sun, and I think that for me is symbolic of the hope of a new dawn,” Brown said. “Even when it rains, it's still beautiful, and it has this ambiance and this feel of hope.”
Concentric circles make a ripple pattern on the floor, and four glowing rings representing the four girls appear to float beneath the ceiling.
“They made a sacrifice out of their innocence in a world that could have been kinder,” Brown said. “Now we have a responsibility, through the methods of the concentric circles, to make a commitment. You take a rock in a still lake and you drop it, and it has a ripple effect.”
Brown said about 25,000 people tour the church every year.
“What if those 25,000 people made a commitment in some shape, form or fashion to make the world better?” he continued.
While educational programming at the center will focus on the intersection of the faith and justice movements, an overarching goal is to create community. Brown said one way is through music. And many days that will be one of the first things visitors notice. Right off the lobby, they’ll be able to join a group singing event – kind of an impromptu choir that will include people touring the center.
“I don't care where you're from, everybody sings,” Brown said. “And so on a particular day, you may hear 100 plus people singing, ‘Let there be peace on earth,’ coming out of that room. So that's what you will hear. What you'll smell is food.”
Creating community through food
The building features a commercial kitchen filled with stainless-steel equipment. It will give the center an ability to create community around food in two ways, Brown said. One is a restaurant that will serve traditional Southern fare for visitors who are often from the East or West coasts.
“When they come, it's like, ‘Where can we go to get good Southern food?’ Come here, and let's have it,” Brown said.
The communal dining space will seat about 60 and create opportunities for diners to meet and get to know one another. Just like at grandma’s house, they won’t have a choice about what to eat, Brown said.
“But I can tell you, the food will be delicious – absolutely delicious,” he continued.
The second way the center will create community through food is by hosting quarterly Southern fusion dinners for up to 150 people in the center’s Legacy Room, Brown said.
“So what if Japanese or Korean food and Southern food had a baby?” he said. “And it creates these unique textures, these unique flavors.”
Brown said those events will be part of the center’s efforts to create a thriving civil rights district, a place where people will spend time on weekends and after 5 p.m. on weekdays.
The Legacy Room also will host guest speakers.
Group activities
Upstairs are rooms where visitors can reflect and build community by making quilts and art projects together. The center will donate the quilts to children in foster care.
“You may have somebody here from the Czech Republic,” Brown said. “You may have somebody here from New York, somebody here from Birmingham, and two other people. And now the conversation happens.”
People can record personal reflections or StoryCorps-style projects where they give their takes on topics such as “overcoming,” Brown said.
A major goal of the Education and Visitor Center is to draw more people – especially locals – to tour the church. In recent years, 90% of visitors have been from out of state, Brown said.
He previously worked in the Jefferson County Schools and said he especially wants to increase the number of children, grades four and up, who visit. He hopes this will attract more adults as well.
“The initial strategy is to entice the children to come,” Brown said. “Then the children come back wide-eyed and excited at home: ‘Mom, Dad, you got to come to this place.’”
Visitors to make commitments
The final activity for visitors before they leave the center will be making a formal commitment. Brown returned to the theme of commitments and ripple effects when the preview tour concluded on a second-floor balcony overlooking the lobby. The concentric circles on the floor were obvious from that vantage point.
Brown said visitors will be asked to enter a commitment and their email address into a kiosk. Staff plan to check in with them in the following weeks to see how they’re doing with those commitments.
“What we want to do is be able to provide resources for people who may have the best intentions to make a commitment, but they get stuck, and so we want to help them to get unstuck,” Brown said.
Then, he added, their actions can create a ripple.
