New Zion Baptist Church
New Orleans
Although the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group of Baptist pastors and activists, was founded in January 1957 in Atlanta, the group was officially incorporated in New Orleans on Valentine’s Day, 1957. SCLC leaders gathered that day at New Zion Baptist Church on the corner of Third and Lasalle streets to sign the forms that made the organization official and established an executive board of directors, including Martin Luther King Jr. as president.
“The fact that the actual incorporation paperwork was signed here in New Orleans, it’s a special thing and valuable, and we’re excited to celebrate it,” said Ella Camburnbeck, executive director of Felicity Redevelopment, a nonprofit organization that works to combat blight and promote redevelopment in the Central City neighborhood.
Soon, visitors to New Zion Baptist Church will have more to explore than the plaque mounted on the side of the church. About five years ago, Felicity bought two vacant lots across from New Zion and partnered with the Tulane Regional Urban Design Center to design and develop the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Pavilion Project, an interpretive site that will help promote the church’s important moment in civil rights history.
The project is part memorial, part educational site, part public gathering area. The covered, open-air pavilion will speak to the lines of a traditional New Orleans “shotgun house” and will have semi-transparent panels printed with information about the church and SCLC. Felicity is working with unCommon Construction, a nonprofit contractor that provides workforce training for high school students, and the organizations plan to break ground on the project and complete construction this summer.
“We’re really looking at this as history that everybody can celebrate,” Camburnbeck said.
Green McAdoo Cultural Center
Clinton, Tennessee
Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton, Tennessee, is housed in a former segregated elementary school, but its exhibits focus on the “Clinton 12,” the 12 black students who led the integration of Clinton High School in 1956, one year before the more widely known integration at Little Rock Central High School.
Visitors can step into a 1950s classroom to watch a seven-minute video about how children attended Green McAdoo School through the eighth grade and then had to bus to Knoxville 20 miles southeast to attend high school, said Marilyn Hayden, center administrator.
The remainder of the galleries tell the story of how Clinton High School was ordered to desegregate following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, how anti-integrationists — both residents and outside influencers — protested the move and how National Guard troops were called in to keep the peace.
Every morning, the Clinton 12 would walk together down Broad Street to Clinton High; the center’s life-size exhibit photos help guests visualize what it was like for the students, Hayden said. Among the exhibits are some of the letters, postcards and telegrams sent to the Clinton 12 students at the time, “some in support and some just horrible,” she said.
At a touch screen, visitors can also watch clips from “The Clinton 12” documentary that was widely aired on PBS in 2008 and 2009 and, in the Epilogue Room, see the 1957 episode of Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” about the school’s desegregation.
