This story has been updated with the Birmingham City Council’s vote Tuesday to allot $200,000 for the project.

The Rev. Arthur Price, pastor of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, said a planned Education and Visitor Center on the church’s campus is a way to help people remember the church’s history and its place in the Civil Rights Movement.

“The same way God commissioned Joshua to put some rocks in place so they can remember, this is a way for us to remember collectively, conspicuously and currently what the Lord has done, is doing and is going to do,” Price said. “I don’t think what happened in this city or what happened at this church is something we should ever forget and to have something in place that causes us to remember, I think is paramount.”

A resolution to allot $200,000 as an economic development incentive for the center was approved by the Birmingham City Council in its meeting Tuesday. The allotment includes $50,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funding and an additional $150,000 to support the installation of a commercial kitchen.

Last week, the church’s capital campaign, which kicked off in February, received a $2.5 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative. The money goes toward the church’s plans to use preserved church spaces and space in the center as “a living sermon” — a place for gathering, learning, connecting and committing to making the world a better place, according to a press release from the church.

The Jefferson County Commission was the initial investor with a $900,000 commitment about a year ago, said Theodore “Ted” Debro, past chairman of 16th Baptist Church’s board of trustees.

The Visitor and Education Center is to be built just west of the church building and parsonage on what is currently a parking lot.

The church draws thousands of visitors annually to tour the facility because of its prominent role in Birmingham and the Civil Rights Movement. It’s central downtown location made it a natural headquarters for the civil rights mass meetings and rallies in the early 1960s, according to the church’s website.

Marches and demonstrations were planned during mass meetings at 16th Street and in many other Birmingham churches in May 1963, resulting in police retaliation and brutality. Most of the marchers were schoolchildren and several thousand people were arrested.

On Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, at 10:22 a.m., the church became known around the world when a bomb exploded. That blast killed four young girls attending Sunday School and injured more than 20 other members of the congregation.

“Too often in life,” Price said, “we remember things that we should forget (and) we forget things that we should remember. Truly. what happened in Birmingham, on September 15, 1963, or the summer or the spring of ’63 is something that we should not forget.”

Plan Answers Longtime Need

Debro is directing the church’s capital campaign, which grew out of a 2016 long-range planning committee that looked at what the church needed for its tourism program and repeated requests to use church space for events.

“Traditionally, we just had the main church and the parsonage,” Debro said. “As years have gone by, there is a need for additional space and additional upgrades in terms of restroom facilities and dining facilities, as well as meeting facilities.

“There were more and more requests and more needs that we needed to meet in the community,” he continued. “This is a way of really expanding that.”

The fundraising campaign is three-pronged.

“One (part) was the construction of the facility, which we were estimating at that point (to be) about $6 million,” Debro said. “Also, we were raising funds for an endowment where we could use interest from an invested endowment to upkeep, repair and service the historic buildings. That part of the campaign was for $1 million.

“Also, we had $500,000 in for capacity building in terms of program development and administration,” he said. “We have completed the endowment campaign now for the million dollars. We have gone above the expectations in the program area with this new Lilly grant. Now we are concentrating more on the funds for the construction of the Visitor and Education Center.”

The center will have several meeting rooms, assembly rooms, a restaurant and an inviting lobby that will complete the experience of touring the church and the parsonage.

In its announcement of the Lilly grant, 16^th Street officials said the church had developed a strategy to incorporate religion into its historic exhibitions and programs, aiming to explore major religious traditions, ideas, themes and questions, and it proposes to expand its programs and share them with a larger audience.

The parsonage, especially on the first level, is devoted as a museum to Wallace Rayfield, one of the first African American architects in the United States. He designed 16th Street and the parsonage.

Also honored in the parsonage museum are the Rev. William Reuben Pettiford and contractor T.C. Windham, who built the church.

Pettiford, a former pastor of 16th Street, developed the Alabama Penny Savings Bank and helped incorporate Birmingham’s Robert Brown Elliot School of Technology, the first school of its kind for Blacks in the United States.

Debro said Pettiford was instrumental in building the community of Birmingham, especially the Smithfield area, back in the early 1900s.

“This museum on the first floor of the parsonage is dedicated to what we are calling the three African American giants in the early 1900s,” Debro said.

The church is building on the legacy of Rayfield having designed the church and parsonage by hiring Black architect Roman Gary.