New museum opens on 69th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Holt Street Baptist Church has opened a new museum as part of the commemoration of the 69th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The museum is located inside the church’s old sanctuary, which is where the mass meeting that launched the boycott was held.
That meeting happened on December 5, 1955, four days after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a a city bus to a white man.
The meeting attracted more than 5,000 people to the church. The boycott is considered one of the key events that launched the modern Civil Rights Movement in America.
The museum opened yesterday with a ribbon cutting.
“This ribbon-cutting signifies not only a beginning of a museum that’s in the church’s name but it also signifies a beginning of a going forward so that we expect fully to have this operational as long as we can, and so that’s why we have this ribbon-cutting so that everybody from everywhere can come and see where it all started from,” church pastor Rev. Willie McClung said.
The museum features never-before-seen artifacts that help explain the state of the city of Montgomery in the 1950s.
The first mass meeting was led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church at the time.
Following yesterday’s ribbon cutting, there was a reenactment of Dr. King’s speech that called for action and a boycott the city’s transit system.
The church sanctuary where the mass meeting was held closed in 1998 when the congregation moved to a new location on South Court Street.
