The Civil Rights District, Built to Remember

Kelly Ingram Park has been a city park since nineteen oh-nine. For most of its history it was ordinary urban green space, a place for sitting and walking. In the spring of nineteen sixty-three it became something else. The park sat directly across Sixteenth Street from the Baptist church that served as the campaign's gathering place, and it was into Kelly Ingram Park that the marchers spilled when they left the church, and it was here that Bull Connor's fire hoses were turned on them.

For nearly three decades after nineteen sixty-three, the park returned to ordinary use. Then, in the early nineteen nineties, the city began planning a civil rights district around these few blocks.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute opened on November fourteenth, nineteen ninety-two, across the street from the park. The idea had originated with Mayor David Vann, who visited a Holocaust museum in Israel and returned convinced that Birmingham needed a place of equivalent permanence. Mayor Richard Arrington, the first Black mayor in Birmingham's history and a man who served five terms between nineteen seventy-nine and nineteen ninety-nine, carried the project through to completion.

The same year the institute opened, Kelly Ingram Park was renovated and rededicated as "A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation." Bronze sculptures by James Drake stand at intervals through the park depicting the events of nineteen sixty-three: protesters against a wall, a figure facing a police dog, children in a fire-hose stream.

The three buildings at the core of the district, the institute, the park, and the church across the street, together form what was designated the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument in two thousand seventeen. They occupy the same few acres where the campaign unfolded fifty-four years earlier.