Tabernacle Baptist Church, Selma: Site of the Voting Rights Movement's First Mass Meeting

Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama. National Park Service

Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, hosted the first mass meeting of the Voting Rights Movement. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its role in the African American civil rights movement.

A memorial becomes a mass meeting

When veteran civil rights leader Sam Boynton died, Bernard Lafayette — chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter registration campaign in Alabama — and Boynton's widow, Amelia Boynton, wanted to hold a memorial service that would also be a mass meeting to rally Selma's Black community to vote. Since the 1930s, the Boyntons had worked to prepare Black residents, academically and emotionally, to register.

They invited Selma's Black churches to host it. Tabernacle's congregation included many of the city's emerging Black middle class — doctors, dentists, pharmacists, teachers, professors and business people — and its pastor, Rev. Louis Lloyd Anderson, who had come from Chicago in 1954, had not always obeyed Jim Crow. He accepted.

His deacons — mostly professors and descendants of the people who built the church's Classical Revival building in 1922 — objected: they feared the church would be bombed, like churches in Birmingham. Anderson answered that if the meeting couldn't be held inside, it would be held on the sidewalk, and he would tell everyone why.

May 14, 1963

About 300 people came. So did Sheriff Jim Clark and many newly deputized, armed white men — many of them just 18 — who lined the church walls while the crowd sang, prayed and remembered Sam Boynton. SNCC's James Forman gave the main address, "The High Cost of Freedom."

Secret classes in the basement

Since the 1930s, members and friends had used Tabernacle's basement for secret voter registration classes. Member Marie Foster was one of the teachers. She and Rev. John D. Hunter, former president of Selma's NAACP chapter before it was banned, kept working for voting rights in secret despite a court injunction restricting their gatherings.

The Courageous Eight

In 1965, defying the court order, Foster and Hunter joined six others to invite Dr. Martin Luther King to Selma to help with voter registration. They became known as the "Courageous Eight":

Marie Foster's brother, dentist Dr. Sullivan Jackson, was a Tabernacle trustee. In a segregated city where Black people were barred from hotels, restrooms, water fountains and restaurants, the Jackson home became Dr. King's headquarters.

Visiting

The church offers guided tours. It joined the African American Civil Rights Network — created by the African American Civil Rights Act of 2017 and coordinated by the National Park Service — in February 2021.

Sources

Based on "Tabernacle Baptist Church (Selma, Alabama)," National Park Service, African American Civil Rights Network; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article spells the SNCC leader's name "Foreman"; it is James Forman.