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| Established | 2002 |
|---|---|
| Location | Greensboro, Alabama, US |
| Coordinates | 32°41′52″N87°36′35″W / 32.69778°N 87.60972°W |
| Type | History |
| Founder | Theresa Burroughs |
| Employees | none |
| Website | safehousemuseum |
The Safe House Black History Museum is a museum and cultural center in Greensboro, Alabama, United States. In March 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. used one of the museum's buildings as a safe house two weeks before he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis.
The museum was founded in 2002 by Theresa Turner Burroughs. [1] [2] [3] The museum's focus is the grass-roots activism in the rural Black Belt that led to the US civil rights movement. [1] [2] [3]
The museum is housed in neighboring shotgun houses in Greensboro's Depot neighborhood, homes originally built for employees of a local cotton gin. [1] [2] [3] [4] One of the houses, a three-room structure, was owned by the Burroughs family, who were local activists; Theresa Burroughs had been childhood friends with Coretta Scott King. [2] [3] Martin Luther King Jr. used it as a safe house on March 21, 1968, while being hunted by the Ku Klux Klan, shortly before his assassination. [1] [3] [5]
Displays include a pickup truck from which King gave a speech when local churches were afraid to allow him to speak in their buildings [1] and mugshots of local activists who were arrested in protests and marches during the civil rights era, including the Greensboro marches, Bloody Sunday, and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. [2] [6] [3] A desk made for a local landowner by one of the people he enslaved is held in its collection. [7]
In 2010, Auburn University's Rural Studio selected the museum as a project for architecture students. The buildings were renovated and their exteriors restored to their original style, and a covered gallery was built to connect them. [3] In 2018, it was one of 20 Alabama sites important to civil rights history to be placed on the World Monument Fund's watch list. [8]
As of 2021, the museum operated on a $10,000 annual budget, had a volunteer executive director, and was open by appointment. [1] Funding comes from donations, grants, admissions fees, and gift shop sales. [1] As of 2024, funders included the city of Greensboro, the Alabama Humanities Alliance, and the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium. [9]
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
Hale County is a county located in the west central portion of the U.S. state of Alabama. As of the 2020 census, the population was 14,785. Its county seat is Greensboro. It is named in honor of Confederate officer Stephen Fowler Hale.
Greensboro is a city in and the county seat of Guilford County, North Carolina, United States. At the 2020 census, its population was 299,035; it was estimated to be 302,296 in 2023. It is the third-most populous city in North Carolina after Charlotte and Raleigh, and the 69th-most populous city in the United States. The population of the Greensboro–High Point metropolitan statistical area was estimated to be 789,842 in 2023. The Piedmont Triad region, of which Greensboro is the most populous city, had an estimated population of 1,736,099 in 2023.
Greensboro is a city in Hale County, Alabama, United States. At the 2010 census the population was 2,497, down from 2,731 at the 2000 census. The city is the county seat of Hale County, Alabama, which was not organized until 1867. It is part of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama Metropolitan Statistical Area.
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
James Morris Lawson Jr. was an American activist and university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader who was the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1953 until his death. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression; they were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South. By highlighting racial injustice, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the civil rights movement.
The National Civil Rights Museum is a complex of museums and historic buildings in Memphis, Tennessee; its exhibits trace the history of the civil rights movement in the United States from the 17th century to the present. The museum is built around the former Lorraine Motel, which was the site of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Two other buildings and their adjacent property, also connected with the King assassination, have been acquired as part of the museum complex.
Martin Luther King III is an American human rights activist, philanthropist and advocate. The elder son of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, King served as the fourth president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1997 to 2004. As of 2024, he is a Professor of practice at the University of Virginia.
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church is a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, United States, affiliated with the Progressive National Baptist Convention. The church was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1974 because of its importance in the civil rights movement and American history. In 1978 the official name was changed to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was pastor there and helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 during the civil rights era. The church is located steps away from the Alabama State Capitol.
Martin Luther King Jr., an African-American clergyman and civil rights movement leader, was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he died at 7:05 p.m. He was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was known for his use of nonviolence and civil disobedience. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, was arrested on June 8, 1968, at London's Heathrow Airport, extradited to the United States and charged with the crime. On March 10, 1969, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. He later made many attempts to withdraw his guilty plea and to be tried by a jury, but was unsuccessful. Ray died in prison in 1998.
The St. Augustine movement was a part of the wider Civil Rights Movement, taking place in St. Augustine, Florida from 1963 to 1964. It was a major event in the city's long history and had a role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Randolph T. Blackwell was an American activist of the Civil Rights Movement, serving in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, amongst other organizations. Coretta Scott King described him as an "unsung giant" of nonviolent social change.
The history of the 1954 to 1968 American civil rights movement has been depicted and documented in film, song, theater, television, and the visual arts. These presentations add to and maintain cultural awareness and understanding of the goals, tactics, and accomplishments of the people who organized and participated in this nonviolent movement.
The Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) was a local organization in Dallas County, Alabama, which contains the city of Selma, that sought to register black voters during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Theresa Burroughs was an active participant in the civil rights movement during the 1960s. She worked to secure the right to vote for blacks in Alabama and the rest of the Southern United States. In 1965 she was attacked and arrested by state troopers and sheriff's deputies along with other civil rights demonstrators attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. She was the founder of the Safe House Black History Museum in Greensboro, Alabama, the location where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was hidden from the Ku Klux Klan during his visit to Alabama in 1968. Burroughs was a childhood friend of King's wife, Coretta Scott King.
Richard Henry Harris, Jr. was a prominent civil rights leader and pharmacist. A personal friend, neighbor and collaborator of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama, Harris was instrumental in three of the most seminal protests of the U.S. civil rights movement: the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Selma to Montgomery marches. Harris's home, best known as the famed “Richard Harris House”, was Montgomery, Alabama’s central command center and safe haven for beaten and bloodied Freedom Riders as they traveled to Jackson, Mississippi amidst physically violent racial rioters, National Guard protection, and Alabama segregationist authorities’ call for martial law.