Forward March

The World Monuments Fund steps up to help protect Alabama’s architectural vestiges of the Civil Rights Movement

- Julie L. Belcove

The buildings are humble, functional. There are sturdy, redbrick churches and modest houses with deep porches beneath overhangs that ward off the heavy Southern heat. There’s even a barbershop, its row of seats where customers wait like a congregation kneeling before an altar.

Seemingly unremarkable pieces of 20th-century America, these structures are in fact quite the contrary: extraordinary artifacts of the Civil Rights Movement, places where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, where Freedom Riders found shelter from mobs, and where social-justice activists huddled to strategize their nonviolent quest for human rights. More than a dozen such structures in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, have now been placed on the 2018 World Monuments Watch, a biennial list of cultural sites at risk of decay or destruction.