Alabama Newscenter — Deadline Approaching To Submit Ideas On Early Plans For Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument

By Michael Sznajderman

The National Park Service (NPS) wants to hear your vision and ideas as it moves forward on developing plans for the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.

July 10 is the final day to submit comments as Park Service officials delve deeper into developing a General Management Plan (GMP) for the monument, which encompasses some of the most important and iconic structures tied to the struggle for equal rights in Birmingham, and which led to landmark federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s. The monument was created in 2017 in one of the last acts by outgoing President Barack Obama.

One of the central structures within the monument footprint is the long-shuttered A.G. Gaston Motel, where civil rights leaders, including the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth and Ralph Abernathy, held strategic meetings around efforts to dismantle segregation in the city. Three people were injured when a bomb exploded at the hotel on May 11, 1963, in an attempt to assassinate King. He was not at the hotel at the time. Also bombed that day was the home of King’s brother, the Rev. A.D. King, in Birmingham’s Ensley neighborhood.

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