(RNS) — Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church are among 33 Black churches receiving millions of dollars for preservation of their sacred and historic buildings.
They are recipients of the fourth annual round of grants from the Preserving Black Churches program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. The program, a $60 million initiative of Lilly Endowment, also announced $5 million in grants for five churches on Martin Luther King Day. It has supported 170 churches across the United States with a total of almost $34 million to provide funding and technical expertise to protect the assets and legacies of historically Black churches.
The Birmingham church, which was bombed in 1963, will receive $300,000 for organizational and capacity building.
Theodore (Ted) Debro, campaign chair for 16th Street Baptist Church, said the grant will allow the church to hire a director of development and fundraising for the building where four young Black girls were killed when members of the Ku Klux Klan set off dynamite as the children were preparing for the Sunday morning worship service.
“As a site of deep historical significance — central to the Civil Rights Movement and a living symbol of resilience, faith, and community — 16th Street Baptist Church deserves strategic, professional capacity to preserve its physical fabric, sustain its ministries, and protect the stories it holds for future generations,” Debro told Religion News Service in a statement.
“This grant addresses persistent inequities in preservation funding that have left many Black churches under-resourced despite their outsized cultural and historical importance.”
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Ebenezer Baptist, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was baptized and went on to co-pastor with his father in the 1960s, will receive $100,000 …