Reviving a Historic Site in Alabama’s Fight for Racial Justice

In a time when Black Americans were denied accommodations across much of the country, proprietor A.G. Gaston constructed his motel to provide “first-class” lodging and food for Black travelers, understanding that having a comfortable place was just as important while on the road as at home. Opened in 1954, the motel was featured in the annual Negro Motorist Green Book travel guide, which offered Black travelers safe options when they traveled through the segregated United States.   

Gaston understood that denying Black Americans access to lodging was a mechanism to deny them not just dignity and respect, but economic opportunity as well. As Tamara Harris Johnson, Gaston’s niece, said, the motel was “a place of purpose, a place of activity and a place of refuge,” one that not only offered comfort to travelers but also a crucial stage for some of the most momentous events of the Civil Rights movement.   

Gaston provided rooms to Civil Rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. From Room 30, dubbed the “War Room,” these and other leaders strategized the Children’s Crusade, devised boycotts and protests, and developed Project C, their plan to, as King wrote while jailed in Birmingham––“create such a crisis and foster such a tension” that even the “most segregated city” in the United States would change.   

Today, the A.G. Gaston Motel sits at the center of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, created by President Barack Obama in 2017. With the support of a $1.1 million Humanities in Place grant, the City of Birmingham has restored the motel’s original coffee shop as a working business and transformed the dining room into a historical exhibit honoring the life of A.G. Gaston. The site is jointly managed by the National Park Service and the City of Birmingham, whose leaders have been actively engaged in efforts to restore the site as a “community gathering place for social justice engagement and change.”