sign in sign up
<<
Home , Kelly Ingram Park, Lola Hendricks

New Pilgrim Baptist Church 903 6th Avenue S, Birmingham AL

Text and photos by Carroll Van West

Description

The historic New Pilgrim Baptist Church sits at a busy intersection southwest of the downtown business district in Birmingham, . Built in two stages, 1946 and 1959, the church blends a gable-front building in Contemporary Gothic styling of 1959 with the earlier 1946 red-brick corner tower building that had also exhibited Gothic styling.

The north façade contains a high open-gable canopy that covers the entire façade and projects from the parapet line, supported by four slender square hollow metal posts that rise to the underside of the open roof. These towers are set back from the central north façade but project at the east and west elevations. The 1959 renovation further modernized the façade by creating three white stripes down its face by application of white plywood panels: the central and widest comprises the central paired double doors, which are now single-light glass in a wood frame; the metal-frame painted glass windows above; and the upper wall and the spandrel. There are narrower stripes of the same type on the tower-front bays, which contain single-door entries and smaller windows above them. An attenuated cross, rising to the gable peak, is attached to the façade, with the crossing above the upper windows. Central steps go up to the concrete porch. At the tower sides, the old round window heads peep out over the canopy roof slopes.

The east elevation exhibits largely the wall of the 1946 red-brick church, but is obscured by an adjacent commercial business that has a one-story brick wall. The sanctuary nave is long under a single gabled roof, with metal-frame rectangular painted glass windows with lower hopper panels, separated by small shouldered buttresses that define the bays. Two of these buttresses decorate, but do not define the edges of, the towers. Between these on the east side of the tower is a single 6-over-6 wood sash window; another round-head one above is all but obscured by the gabled canopy roof.

The south elevation is the rear section of the 1959 addition. It has two symmetrical bays, with metal-framed six-over-six slag glass painted blue windows. Between the windows on the first story and the second story is a concrete white panel and above the second story windows are concrete white panels in the top of which is a rectangular metal ventilation grille. The combination of rectangular panels and rectangular windows give this elevation a decided 1960s look.

The west elevation is an one-story asphalt flat-roof administrative and classroom building that was attached from front to rear to the original west wall of the 1946 brick church. Metal-framed six-pane windows of slag glass painted blue are arranged as a horizontal band of glass between the brick walls and the roof eave. Metal glutters, painted white, drain water from the flat roof, but also serve like pilasters, separating the bands of windows. A double-metal door entrance is centered on the addition. A metal covered walkway extends from the entrance to the street sidewalk.

The yard beside the addition to the street is now a grassed playground, and the nominated property is surrounded by an iron picket fence.

The adaptive reuse of the building from being a religious facility to being a daycare business operated by the church has led to few interior changes. In the sanctuary, the original church furniture has been removed, but the former aproned dais and choir chancel remain; the choir area is recessed between the anteroom sidewalls. The ceiling is crested toward the roof beam and covered with acoustical tile; light fixtures are the Gothic lanterns and a Colonial Revival-inspired brass chandelier, c. 1995, in the center. The floor, which is the original one from 1959, is hardwood laid on the diagonal. There is a rear balcony, its bulkhead raised to create room space and so now invisible from the floor. The large open space of the sanctuary, where hundreds gathered during the , remains intact.

The addition of 1959 created church offices and classrooms, which wrap around the sanctuary space. These retain their original fixtures, flooring, walls, and spaces. The day-care facility has merely moved its operations into the existing historic spaces with minimal changes.

History

Birmingham residents formed the New Pilgrim Baptist Church as one of the new churches to serve the increasing number of African-American laborers in the southside neighborhoods on the outskirts of downtown Birmingham. The church site dates to 1945-46, when returning veterans helped the congregation to raise funds and build a new brick church that was Gothic in tone, with a large projecting, crested and arched entry vestibule and a similarly arched clerestory window above. The towers were likewise crested to repeat the front gable angle. In 1958-59, under the leadership of dynamic young minister Rev. Nelson H. Smith, Jr., the congregation expanded the building with new administrative and classroom addition. These spaces were often used for meetings and for administrative support for the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Over the next two years, from 1959-1961, the congregation finished its new building by adding a Contemporary Gothic-styled concrete, steel, and glass front. In the modernization the vestibule and tower parapets were removed and the clerestory window partially covered.

A native of Brewton, Alabama, who was born on August 23, 1930, Smith grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, where his father was a minister. In 1952, he graduated from Selma University, where he had become friends with another student, . Rev. Smith became the pastor of New Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1953, and soon involved himself in civil rights activism on issues of urban renewal and police brutality. In a December 8, 2000 feature story on New Pilgrim Baptist in the Birmingham News, Smith observed that he and Shuttlesworth “came to Birmingham the same year. The City was totally and absolutely segregated. You needed a Shuttlesworth for this community. You had a , and you needed a Fred Shuttlesworth.” Rev. Smith perceived his role as that of a loyal lieutenant to Shuttlesworth’s leadership, a role that Shuttlesworth, in that same Birmingham News feature, described as “a critical role. We were sort of a glue. We stuck together through hard times.” In the mid-1950s, Deacon Richmond Davis, in his weekly radio show from St. Peter Primitive Baptist Church in Bessemer, gave the young Rev. Smith the nickname of “Fireball” for his oratory skill. Rev. Smith accepted the nickname but never liked it: “I figured there was much more to my preaching than being emotionally charged,” he told the Birmingham News in December 8, 2000.

Rev. Smith was among the group of activists who planned the creation of the ACMHR in June 1956. At the founding meeting of the ACMHR at Sardis Baptist Church, he read the organization’s Declaration of Principles and was elected secretary. Beginning in 1958, Rev. Smith also played an active role in the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and he founded a Birmingham chapter of the SCLC in the early 1960s. Historians of the Civil Rights Movement have recognized Smith as one of the most effective leaders, active in the administration of the organization as well as in demonstrations and in court cases. Smith represented the largest congregation in the ACMHR in its early years. He was the son of a prominent Baptist minister, and counted Rev. J. L. Ware as one of his mentors, a relationship that others in the ACMHR viewed negatively since they perceived Ware as a conservative and not as an activist.

Rev. Smith was particularly important to the ACMHR in 1961-62 as the one leader who actively sought the involvement of student activist. “Smith understood that the Movement needed to be liberated from its preacher mystique.” (McWhorter, 244). Smith in 1961 approached Frank Dukes and Charles Davis, students at Miles College, and began to encourage them to get active. Through Smith’s encouragement, the ACMHR received a much needed youthful shot in the arm for youthful enthusiasm and a willingness to become more aggressive in their confrontations with authority. Rev. Smith’s activism, in part, can be traced to his definition of the proper role of a minister. He “asserted that a pastor is given authority by God himself and that a church is a theocracy, not a democracy. Smith also traced this understanding through the history of African American religion, finding Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and Richard Allen as strong pastors who took the lead in pastoral matters.” (Manis, 72) As Rev. Smith told the Birmingham News on December 8, 2000, “I don’t see my role as a Sunday role. There are people with problems 24 hours a day. I want to be giving hope to people. I just don’t believe Jesus died for us so we could dress in Sunday clothes and then take off our religion and hang it in the closet for another six days.”

In the Project C Campaign of April 1963, Rev. Nelson Smith was an active participant in most of the mass meetings and strategies. On April 7, 1963, Smith, Rev. John T. Porter, and Rev. A. D. King led the famous “preacher’s ” from St. Paul’s United Methodist Church toward City Hall. Birmingham officials, under the direction of Bull Connor, stopped the marchers at . The three ministers kneeled down in prayer—a moment now symbolized by a monument at the park—but before they were arrested and carried off to jail. A few weeks later, in late May, Rev. Smith carried out a fund-raising and public relations trip to northern churches, where he would preach, raise money for the ACMHR and SCLC, and bring the plight of civil rights activists to a national audience. While speaking at the Amity Baptist Church in Jamaica, New York, Rev. Smith was interviewed for the New Pittsburgh Courier of May 25, 1963, and asked about his Palm Sunday arrest: “They told us that we were in contempt of court. But we do not feel that there is a law in all the world that would probhit walking and praying.” As the newspaper further reported, Rev. Smith told his northern audiences that the conflict in Birmingham was not merely a black problem or an Alabama problem. “it is America’s problem and greater progress will be made when all America, from the New England farmhand to our highest elected officials realize this and accepts his individual responsibility of doing something about it.”

Rev. Smith and from New Pilgrim also served on the combined ACMHR- SCLC Central Committee that coordinated the demonstrations of April and May, 1963.

The single most significant event associated with New Pilgrim Baptist Church, however, is the May 5, 1963, March on the Birmingham Jail. As reported in the May 6, 1963 edition of the Birmingham News, a group of 1,500 participants met at the church, where they heard a inspiring sermon against injustice from Rev. Charles Billups, Jr. After the sermon, the demonstrators peacefully left the church and marched along Sixth Avenue South “on the sidewalk for three blocks where they were stopped by waiting policemen, firemen with hoses and police dogs” massed across the street at the jail. For once, Birmingham officials showed some restraint. As the reporter wrote, “Hoses and dogs were not used. They sang and prayed as they knelt on the lawn of the Traffic Engineering Department shop and invited firemen to turn on the fire hoses. At Sixth Avenue and Fifth Street the Negroes were allowed to cross over to park facing city jail. Once again they knelt and prayed as police lines were reinforced to halt any attempts to break through to the jail grounds.” Hundreds gathered to watch, and police blocked off five-block stretch of Sixth Avenue. Group prayed and sang for forty minutes and then returned to the church. To diminish the opportunity for violence, according to the Birmingham News reporter, “Police kept all white people from the church or on the sidewalk of the block surrounding the church.”

Many marchers recall the spiritual power that not only motivated the demonstrators, but seemingly cowed some of the Birmingham officials. Mamie Brown Mason recalls the determination of Rev. Billups in leading the marchers. She also witnessed a rather surprising reaction from one of the Birmingham firemen gathered at the jail. “There was this tank that Bull Conner was in and he tried to get the firemen to turn the hose on us. This firemen refused to turn the hose on us and he told him, ‘You turn it on yourself. I am not going to do that.’ And he said, ‘All these good people wanted to do is to march and pray.’ e said, ‘Let the good Reverend pray.’ And we did. That was a time that we all rejoiced in seeing this fireman not do what Bull Conner was trying to demand him to do. He would not.” (Mason interview, 18)

Within his church, Smith is also significant as one of the young ministers who helped to create the Progressive National Convention, out of the more conservative National Baptist Convention in 1961. He served as president of the Progressive National Convention from 1974 to 1976.

Another member of the New Pilgrim Baptist congregation, Lola Hendricks, was ACMHR corresponding secretary, and Georgia Price and Rev. Charles Billups, Jr., were two other significant officers and active participants in ACMHR affairs. Thus the church, along with Bethel Baptist Church, served as the administrative heart of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham. Its motto—“The Church in America where people are taught that God is love, right is right, wrong is wrong, and all men are brothers”—is emblematic of the philosophy its members carried out during Birmingham’s Civil Rights Movement. Regular meetings involving all aspects of Civil Rights activism took place at the church building from 1959 to 1965.

According to compilations from Birmingham police records for the early 1960s, New Pilgrim hosted seventeen ACMHR meetings from 1961 to 1963. Attendance ranged from 225 at the first recorded meeting in September 1961 to over 1,000 estimated participants at meetings in May 1963. Church members still vividly recall the power of the mass meetings at New Pilgrim. Gwendolyn Gamble, who grew up in Kingston then moved to Titusville when a teenager, recalls the meetings of her teen years. “A typical mass meeting was hearing shouting, singing, having a hallelujah time. Meeting, greeting, loving, caring and sharing. You get to see people and meet people that you didn’t know. You found more people more concerned about each other. You knew that you would get to hear some great speakers because the nights that Dr. King was not Shuttlesworth or Rev. N. H. Smith. It was always somebody there to give us a message that we needed to hear and that we enjoyed listening to.” (Gamble interview, 8). Margaret Givner Brown, another Titusville native whose father was deacon at New Pilgrim, recalled attending several meetings at the church where Reverends Fred Shuttlesworth, , Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Smith all spoke with fire and conviction. “I remember them being very outspoken. I remember it would be exiting. All I remember is when they talked, we listened. They had a way about them that they could calm a crowd. And, what they had to say, even to a child it was interesting.” (Brown interview, 5).

Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were not the only significant outsiders who spoke at New Pilgrim during the ACMHR meetings from 1961 to 1965. Others included Freedom Rider Clyde Carter from Charlotte, North Carolina; Rev. E. S. Blackstone of Philadelphia; Rev. of Atlanta; of SNCC; Rev. J. W. Hayes of Montgomery; Rev. , activist ; and comedian and activist .

In mid-September 1963, New Pilgrim Baptist Church was the site of the funeral of Johnnie Robinson, who police shot in back on the morning of the terrorist bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four young girls. Police brutality was a constant theme of the ACMHR meetings held at the church between 1961 and 1963; now it claimed one of the congregation’s own members. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rev. Ralph Abernathy were there; Rev. Nelson Smith spoke as did Rev. Abraham Woods.

At the eight anniversary of the creation of the ACMHR in June 1964, New Pilgrim Baptist Church was one of the featured location, hosting the “choir night” when congregation and ACMHR members presented a musical presentation of what they had experienced over the past years. The 1964 Annual Report stated about the presentation:

The Alabama Christian Movement For Human Rights Choir is well acquainted with the struggles of the Negro. Thus, we present the story of oppressed people with songs. Since a Renaissance is the activity or spirit of the great revival, our presentation tells some of the tribulations of the oppressed and how their spirits were not daunted though faced with intimidations and burdens. Instead, they had renewed courage and strength from the Most High and are still marching up Freedom’s Road. We believe that ‘They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,” and He will see us through.

In 1965, the annual ACMHR anniversary celebration again set Choir Night at New Pilgrim Baptist Church, but this time, the meeting featured music and addresses. Rev. Edward Gardner Rev. C. W. Woods, and then Rev. James Bevel of the SCLC spoke to the hundreds gathered at the church.

Sources

Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) Meeting and Police Department Records, Eugene ("Bull") Connor Papers, Birmingham Public Library Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham, Alabama.

Annual Report, 1958, Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Birmingham: ACMHR, 1958.

Annual Report, 1964, Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Birmingham: ACMHR, 1964.

Annual Report, 1965, Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Birmingham: ACMHR, 1965.

Birmingham News, May 6, 1963.

Birmingham Post-Herald, May 6, 1963.

Brown, Margaret Givner, interview, June 13, 1996 with Binnie Myles at Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Archive Division, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

Eskew, Glenn. But for Birmingham. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Fallin, Wilson, Jr. “Rock Solid Faith: African American Church Life and Culture in 1956 Birmingham.” Majorie L. White and Andrew M. Manis, eds. Birmingham Revolutionaries: The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000. 7-18.

Fieldwork notes, July 23, 2003. In possession of the author.

Gamble, Gwendolyn, interview, January 24, 1996, with Horace Huntley at Miles College. Archive Division, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

Garrison, Greg. “Presence in the Pulpit: Rev. Nelson Smith Jr. Celebrates 50 Years at New Pilgrim Baptist.” Birmingham News, November 14, 2003.

Garrison, Greg. “Social Activist, Pastor Smith Reflects on 50 Years at New Pilgrim.” Birmingham News, December 8, 2000.

Hendricks, Lola. Interviews with Marjorie L. White. 1999. Birmingham Historical Society.

Johnson, Thomas A. “Birmingham Minister: ‘Come Down, Help Us.’” New Pittsburgh Courier, May 25, 1963.

Manis, Andrew M. A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999.

Mason, Mamie Brown, interview, June 2, 1995, with Horace Huntley at Miles College. Archive Division, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

New Pilgrim Baptist Church Files, Birmingham Historical Society Civil Rights Collection- Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and Civil Rights Churches Files, Birmingham Historical Society, Birmingham, Alabama. Files include Board of Equalization Records, City Directory Trace, and Photographs.

Price, Georgia, phone interview, July 1, 1993, with Birmingham Historical Society. Notes, New Pilgrim Baptist Church File, Birmingham Historical Society.

Smith, Rev. Nelson H., Jr., phone interview, June 28, 1993, with Birmingham Historical Society. Notes, New Pilgrim Baptist Church File, Birmingham Historical Society.

White, Marjorie L., A Walk to Freedom-The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Movement for Human Rights. Birmingham: Birmingham Historical Society, 1998.