Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 1883

The red-brick building at the corner of Dexter Avenue and Decatur Street was built between eighteen eighty-three and eighteen eighty-nine by a congregation that had organized six years earlier, freedmen and free people of color who bought this lot in January eighteen seventy-nine for two hundred seventy dollars. The building's design is Gothic Revival. Its architect was Pelham Anderson. Its primary builder was William Watkins, a member of the congregation.

From that building, looking directly down Dexter Avenue, you can see the portico of the Alabama State Capitol. The visual axis is exact. The church and the capitol face each other across four blocks.

For most of its early history the church was primarily a community of the Black professional class in Montgomery, educators and ministers and business owners. Vernon Johns, one of the most electrifying preachers in the Black church tradition, served as pastor from nineteen forty-seven to nineteen fifty-two. He preached uncomfortable sermons on racial injustice, sometimes to audiences who preferred he stay quiet. He did not stay quiet.

In nineteen fifty-four, a twenty-five-year-old minister just finishing his doctorate at Boston University accepted the pastoral call. Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Montgomery Improvement Association from the church basement. The boycott he helped coordinate began December fifth, nineteen fifty-five, and ran three hundred eighty-one days. It ended when federal desegregation orders for city buses arrived on December twentieth, nineteen fifty-six.

The church was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-four. Its name was changed to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in nineteen seventy-eight. The building looks down Dexter Avenue toward the same portico from which Jefferson Davis took his oath in eighteen sixty-one. The congregation chose this address and this view before any of that history was made.