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, Alabama. 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 Civil Rights Movement, 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, Fred Shuttlesworth. 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 Bull Connor, 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 march” from St. Paul’s United Methodist Church toward City Hall. Birmingham officials, under the direction of Bull Connor, stopped the marchers at Kelly Ingram Park. 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.