Montgomery's Bricklayers Hall was the birthplace where many significant changes began

As published in the Montgomery Advertiser

Decades of history exist inside the walls of an unsuspecting two-story building along Montgomery's Union Street. Upstairs are the same chairs the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used when meeting with other pastors during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Out front are roses that are named after his wife, Coretta Scott King.

Downstairs the walls are lined with pictures of past U.S. presidents posing next to Doris Crenshaw, who was mentored by Rosa Parks at a young age and has passed that mentorship on to generations of Montgomery's youth. 

From its creation, the missions of people who have worked within the Bricklayers Hall have been rooted in pushing against the grain in the pursuit of making change. Built in the early 1950s, the Bricklayers Hall was constructed by a Black union despite the lack of popularity for unions in the South. 

Because of this connection to the civil rights movement and the important decision making that occurred inside its walls, the hall was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. 

For the first few months of the bus boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the Rev. King and others, operated out of churches until moving its headquarters to the Bricklayers Hall. Within those walls, MIA staff members cut the checks for the Black-owned gas stations who fueled the carpools during the boycott. The MIA Newsletter was printed at the hall and when King called for an end to the 381-day boycott, it was from within the hall.

The building served as the MIA's headquarters until 1960, when it then became the office of civil rights lawyer Charles S. Conley Jr.

State Rep. Thad McClammy remembers the numerous trips he made between the hall and the Montgomery airport while a student at Alabama State University, volunteering his time to bring other lawyers from out of town to meet with Conley. 

To McClammy, the building is one of Montgomery's most historically significant places. In the four years Conley operated out of it, he'd work multiple cases that made national changes. 

In 1961, Conley joined attorneys Fred Gray and S.S. Seay Jr., along with two white lawyers in defending the Freedom Riders, arguing segregation on interstate buses was a violation of their 14th Amendment rights. 

Judge Frank M. Johnson would go on to rule in Conley's favor. 

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Amid working that case, Conley defended Willie Seals Jr., a Black man who had been sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Mobile for allegedly raping a white woman. Seals case was overturned, and his case would give future lawyers the precedent to challenge the exclusion of Black jury members in trials. 

Conley was also the lawyer who represented Robert Cobb, who challenged segregation in Montgomery's public libraries. 

The most popular case Conley worked was in 1964 when Montgomery's police commissioner L.B. Sullivan sued the New York Times and four pastors. The libel suit came — with Conley joining two attorneys to defend the pastors — in response to the Times refusal to issue a retraction to an ad that criticized Montgomery police's treatment of the ASU students who protested segregation within the state Capitol's snack bar. 

People across the country are familiar with The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, McClammy said, but they rarely realize its connection to Montgomery. 

"So many significant decisions came out of Alabama and out of this building," he said about the Bricklayers Hall. 

Today, the hall is home to McClammy's daughter's law office on the left and the Southern Youth Leadership Development Institute on the right, if you're facing the front of the building. 

To Courtney Meadows, director of student programs for the institute and pastor at Hutchison Missionary Baptist Church, the Bricklayers Hall and all of its history symbolizes the strength in partnership and in unity. 

"The movement is in the paint, the walls, the bricks," he said. 

Meadows met Crenshaw, Parks' mentee, when he was 12 and she immediately began pouring the lessons she'd gained during the civil rights movement into him. 

Crenshaw recalled going to the Bricklayers Hall as a child with Parks to pick up voter registration forms when it still housed the MIA. 

"She had a lot of courage and she was kind of radical in terms of some of the people around here. She instilled a lot in me. ... I developed a strong interest in the betterment of our people, and I still have that in me," Crenshaw said of Parks. 

Both she and Meadows view the institute as a way to continue on the mission of civil rights leaders like Parks, King and Conley. Bringing in a cohort of 30 young people each year, they are developing emerging leaders, Meadows said. 

Moving to the hall about six years ago assists in that. Those chairs upstairs that King and other pastors sat in during the bus boycott are the ones the institute's students sit in today. 

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Krista Johnson at kjohnson3@gannett.com.