In his final days as America’s first African-American president, Barack Obama designated three new national monuments honoring the nation’s civil rights history.
In anticipation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, Jan. 16, the 44th president of the United States issued proclamations Jan. 12 establishing two national monuments in Alabama — one in the civil rights district in Birmingham and the other in Anniston at the former Greyhound bus station and site of an attack outside of town on Freedom Riders in 1961.
The president also designated the first national monument dedicated to Reconstruction, a complicated era of American history intended to reshape the South after the emancipation of 4 million slaves following the Civil War. Resisted by reactionary forces of white supremacy, the effort was succeeded by a period of voter suppression and racial segregation leading up to the struggle for civil rights in the mid-20th century.
The Reconstructionist Era National Monument located in Beaufort County, S.C., includes the Brick Baptist Church, the oldest church on St. Helena Island, built by slaves in 1855. In the early years, black worshippers stood in the balcony out of view of white plantation owners seated on the lower level.
After Union naval forces captured Port Royal, S.C., on Nov. 7, 1861 — long remembered by former slaves as the “day of the big gun-shoot” — the church was turned over to 8,000 former slaves as part of an experiment preceding the Reconstruction period often referred to as the country’s Second Founding.
The Baptist Church of Beaufort held the deed and charged the black congregation a nominal annual lease until signing the building over to the African-American congregation for $1 in 1973.
The Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument will protect the historic A.G. Gaston Motel, which at one point served as headquarters for the civil rights campaign led by Dr. King that helped lead to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The monument will also tell stories of nearby sites including the 16th Street Baptist Church, where a bombing killed four young girls attending Sunday school and injured more than 20 church members on a Sunday morning in 1963.
Freedom Riders Bus Burned near Anniston, Alabama, 1961. (Photo/Public Domain
The Freedom Riders National Monument in Anniston, Ala., includes two sites commemorating the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who toured the South by bus in 1961 to test a U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring segregation of interstate transportation facilities, including bus terminals, unconstitutional.
One of two groups traveling from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans pulled into the Greyhound bus station in Anniston, Ala., on May 14, 1961. They were met by a segregationist mob including members of the Ku Klux Klan throwing rocks, breaking windows and slashing their tires.
Six miles outside of town, the flat tires gave out, and the driver stopped on the shoulder of Highway 202. A member of the mob firebombed the disabled vehicle with protestors still on-board. Later that day the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham rescued Freedom Riders from a hostile mob at the Anniston hospital and drove them to shelter in his church.
Photos of the attack taken by a freelance journalist following the police escort appeared in newspapers across the country, creating sympathy for the non-violent freedom riders and contributing to a shift in thinking for many white Americans on the justice of their cause.
Obama, who leaves office Jan. 20, described the new additions as part of his larger goal “to build a more inclusive National Park System and ensure that our national parks, monuments and public lands are fully reflective of our nation’s diverse history and culture.”