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Bethel Baptist Church from 1953 through 1961. The church often served as a gathering place for discussions of civil rights among blacks, gatherings that angered white supremacists. In 1958, Bethel Baptist was bombed, though the church was empty at the time. The bombing cemented Shuttlesworth s fiery determination to bring Birmingham to the center of the Civil Rights Movement.

The national monument includes historic Kelly Ingram Park. The park served as a congregating area for demonstrations in the early 1960s, including the ones in which police dogs and fire hoses were turned on marchers by Birmingham police. Images of those

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attacks haunted Birmingham in the decades that followed, but they were the same images that were instrumental in overturning legal segregation.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Colored Masonic Temple, St. Paul Lutheran Church and portions of the 4th Avenue Business District, which arose from blacks being shunned by white merchants, are included in the national monument. Also part of the designation is the A.G. Gaston Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. met and collaborated with allies during the Birmingham campaign.