EJI announces new hotel overlooking downtown Montgomery to open in 2025

Elevation Convening Center and Hotel under construction in downtown Montgomery, Thursday, December 12, 2024 – Photo by WAKA Action 8 News

The Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative has announced a new hotel and convening center that will overlook downtown.

The new Elevation Convening Center and Hotel will be at 600 Montgomery Street, at the site of the long-abandoned Hilltop Arms Apartments in the Five Points area, which is along the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march route of 1965.

Elevation will have eight floors, 99 rooms and will partially open in the spring before its full opening in the fall. It is designed to complement EJI’s civil rights sites throughout downtown.

EJI says Elevation will be more than a typical hotel and will feature a library, historical narrative, art and architecture.  The Convening Center will include meeting spaces, including classrooms, boardrooms and a ballroom that can host 200 people. It will also have a restaurant, called AYA.

In addition, a new park and exhibit will honor the participants of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march who walked through the area on their way to the Alabama Capitol.

“This is historic space. It is something we want to elevate and uplift,” EJI founder Bryan Stevenson said. “We’re going to have amazing sculpture and exhibits and a timeline that talks about the history of activism between 1955 and 1965. The city of Montgomery changed the world — from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the Selma-to-Montgomery march. We did things in this community that have had reverberations across the globe that continue to today, and I want everyone who comes to Montgomery to have a more detailed understanding of that history and this park will try to facilitate that and we’re excited that that’s a part of what we will be developing and presenting.”