Civil Rights Movement Alabama Research Tour - Post 1 of 3
16th Street Baptist Church
I signed up to a research tour with the Black Cultural Center at Purdue University this month. The trip began on Friday Oct 9th and ended on Tuesday Oct 13th. As a group we set off at 3.30am that Friday and travelled down from Indiana, through Kentucky and Tennessee to reach Alabama in the early afternoon. We split into further ensembles that related to our interests during the tour. I was part of the Gordon Parks Ensemble that specializes in visual arts. It was our job to document and capture things that we encountered, during this Civil Rights Movement research tour in order to educate and enlighten people at the BCC's Cultural Arts Festival this December.
Purdue Black Cultural Center Students walking to the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL.
Our first destination was Birmingham, AL. We walked from our hotel to the 16th Street Baptist Church where we were given an informative tour of the building and the Kelly Ingram Park opposite by Mr Barry McNealy. I learnt that the 16th Street Baptist Church was a focal point during the Civil Rights Movement, it held several mass meetings and was even the subject of a white supremacist Ku Klux Klan bombing in 1963 that killed four girls; Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair. I also learnt about the significance of the buildings brickwork that can be seen in the first wider image above and closer image below. The 16th Street Baptist Church and the Kelly Ingram Park opposite has yellow, black, brown and white bricks. I learnt that, despite the discrimination that African Americans faced in the past they opted to use this colour scheme as it signifies equality. "Yellow, Black, Brown and White, we're all the same in God's sight".
