When Gwendolyn Sanders Gamble was part of civil-rights efforts in Birmingham as a teenager in the 1960s, she never thought a facility like the new Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Education and Visitor Center would be built.
On Tuesday, after a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the center that will focus on the intersection of the faith and justice movements, Gamble was one of the first to enter the building. Standing on a second-floor balcony overlooking guests milling about the center’s sunlight-filled lobby, Gamble said that back in 1963 she was subconsciously hopeful for something like this.
“The dream did come alive,” she said. “We're working on it, but I never imagined that going to jail, getting beaten, water hoses and all that would accumulate all of this. It's a joy in my heart today to see that this is commemoration of what we did in 1963, and we're not going to stop here.”
At age 15, Gamble was a recruiter trying to get other students to join the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham. She faced fire hoses when children marched out of the church, which is next door to the center, to protest segregation. And authorities arrested her for sitting at a whites-only lunch counter at a downtown department store.
She knew two of the four girls who were killed on Sept. 15, 1963, when Ku Klux Klan members bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The church played a vital role in the struggle for Black civil rights in Birmingham, and its bombing was a pivotal event that shocked the world.
The church held an annual memorial service for the four girls – Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley – immediately before dedicating the new education and visitor center. The service also honored two teenage boys – Johnny Robinson Jr. and Virgil Ware – who were shot and killed in Birmingham on the day of the bombing.
The center will provide a place for guests to reflect after touring the church’s exhibit about its history and the bombing. It also will provide educational programming and activities aimed at building community.
Gamble said the center is opening at a time when some political leaders are trying to erase the history she lived through; for instance, by changing exhibits at museums to reduce attention on slavery or race.
“We have certain people who I feel who actually are trying to turn things back,” she said. “But see, when you’ve been through this … we’re not going back. We’re not. History is history. It either happened or didn’t. In this case, it happened. That’s a mark that cannot be erased.”
Gamble said there’s still a lot more work to do, and the center will help.
“We have a long ways to go, and we're going to keep on keeping on,” she said. “We were determined in 1963 that we were going all the way, we're determined today to go all the way. But we're going to have more people involved, and that's what it's going to take, all of us. And once we realize that, victory is ours.”
The last activity for visitors before they leave the center is making a personal commitment to a positive change by choosing among numerous options at kiosks in the center’s lobby. When someone makes a commitment, it appears on the screen of a blue, stained-glass-looking installation on one of the lobby’s two-story walls. The words rise up from the floor.
Birmingham-area resident Melissa Bean was excited Tuesday to try it out.
“It has several Bible passages that you can choose from, and then you just choose which one speaks to you the most,” she said. “For me, ‘If one suffers, all suffer together,’ because we’re all one community. So I will choose that one. The kiosk thanks me for my commitment, and it goes up on the board for everybody to see.”
Bean said the new center is now part of Birmingham’s legacy, and she’s proud of her hometown for investing in it.
“I just really wanted to come help celebrate the strides that Birmingham has made,” she said.
