Tabernacle Baptist Church

Tabernacle Baptist Church was founded in 1885, and in March of that year the congregation purchased its site. The current church, built in 1922 under the leadership of Dr. David Vivian Jemison and designed by African-American architect and Tabernacle member David T. West, incorporates bricks from the original church building on its south and west elevations. It was the most formidable Classic Revival design of any African-American institution in Selma from the Jim Crow era, and with its multi-colored stained glass clerestory illuminating a huge open interior, it was the most architecturally compelling space Selma's African-Americans could experience for most of the twentieth century. West and the congregation placed the church on the corner of Minter Avenue and Broad Street, with a monumental classical-style facade facing Broad, as a concession to the bitter Jim Crow ethos of the time, while also providing a "separate but equal" entrance on Minter Avenue that the congregation could actually use. Tabernacle continued as a leader for Christian influence and social justice. After Dallas County Voter's League stalwart Sam Boynton died in May 1963, Amelia Boynton and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee activists Bernard and Colia Lafayette sought to use his memorial service as a vehicle for voting rights activism. Although many African-American churches feared white reprisals and did not want the service in their buildings, Rev. Louis Lloyd Robinson, Tabernacle's pastor from 1954 to 1968, volunteered the church for the memorial service despite opposition from Tabernacle's deacons, even threatening to hold the service on the sidewalk if necessary. As a result, Selma's first voting rights mass meeting was held there on May 14, 1963, and afterward mass meetings in churches became a foundation strategy for the Civil Rights Movement in Selma. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke there in October 1963 about the struggle in Birmingham, and on February 16, 1968, he returned to address a mass meeting supporting his Poor People's Campaign and its planned march on Washington, D.C. The church is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Selma, Alabama · United States