Selma’s Brown Chapel: When a building is more than bricks and mortar

I awoke early on the morning of March 21, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, and headed straight for Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was scheduled to speak there at the start of a long-planned voting rights march to the State Capitol in Montgomery, 54 miles away. It was the third attempt.

From the steps of the church, the future Nobel Peace Prize winner told us that, as participants, we would be helping make Alabama “a new Alabama” and America “a new America.”

It was exactly what I wanted to hear – a young college student from the North who had come south to change the world. So I didn’t think much about a building called Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. I only saw it as a backdrop to one of this country’s most powerful orators.

Since then, I have returned to Selma many times to celebrate the promise of that march, which concluded in Montgomery on March 25 and led to the enactment several months later of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Each visit, I have made it a point to spend time at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church – sacred ground in the continuing struggle for racial justice.

The red brick building, with its distinctive twin bell towers, has served Selma’s African American community since it was constructed in 1908 under the stewardship of Black architect and contractor A.J. Farley.

Over the years, the church has been a sanctuary for activists fighting African American disenfranchisement. Defying a 1964 court injunction against civil rights gatherings, the Rev. P.H. Lewis, then pastor, welcomed activists into the church. Among them was Dr. King, who used the church to plan strategy and mobilize support for the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

The church normally hosts thousands of visitors every year and offers weekly worship services and outreach programs to the local community. But it is now closed to the public for the foreseeable future, following the discovery of significant termite and water damage to the wooden beams supporting the balconies, the bell towers, and many other areas. A major effort is underway to restore the building to its former glory.

To raise public awareness of the building’s plight, the National Trust for Historic Preservation last month named the church one of America’s 11 most endangered historic places, along with several other sites of social and cultural significance. In announcing the designation, the NTHP noted that discrimination and oppression have been “long and difficult threads throughout American history. But an equally powerful thread is the history of people standing against such injustices.” Places like Brown Chapel, it said, are “physical reminders of a complex past,” and they help ensure “we as a society do not forget or deny the truths of our past.”

Alabama Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, who grew up attending Brown Chapel, sees the church as “critical to understanding our nation’s ongoing struggle for equality and justice. ... If we don’t tell our story, someone else will, and they may not get it right.”

An important part of that story took place a couple of weeks before the Selma-to-Montgomery march I participated in. Several hundred protesters, led by John Lewis (who would go on to serve in Congress), tried to walk the 54 miles from Brown Chapel to Montgomery. But that day, March 7, they were viciously beaten back by Alabama state troopers and sheriff’s deputies at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a short distance from downtown Selma. The day has become known as Bloody Sunday.

Mr. Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull in the attack, told me before his death in 2020 that he and the other injured marchers were brought back to Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church and treated there.

“The Selma-to-Montgomery march had a profound impact on the psyche of all Americans,” Mr. Lewis said. “It transformed American politics.”

Selma Mayor James Perkins Jr. says he was 12 years old at the time, and while his parents did not permit him to participate in the planned march, he tells of later sneaking away to the church and seeing the aftermath.

“I was here as the marchers were returning,” he said at a recent press briefing in Selma. “I witnessed firsthand adults with tear gas in their eyes, people crying and weeping who were in shock of what had taken place. Those memories are etched in my mind, being at Brown Chapel on March 7, 1965.

“We are not just celebrating a building [by restoring it]. ... This is really about the history [of] this community. It’s about the people of this community. It’s about the movement that is still a movement today.”

Next spring, I plan to return to Selma again to celebrate the promise of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. And I will again spend time at the red brick building that I now see differently from how I did more than 50 years ago. It is my hope that by then – if not sooner – Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church will have been brought back to life for both visitors and the local community to experience the spirit of progress it embodies and urges.