Interpretive center to be built at ASU
By Jill Nolin • Montgomery Advertiser • January 12, 2011
After almost two years of controversy, the National Park Service announced Tuesday that Alabama State University has been named the site of Montgomery's interpretive center -- centers set up for those who travel the civil rights trail to hear the story of the 1965 Voting Rights March in Alabama.
Some historians have said that locating the center at ASU, rather than at other locations that applied for it that had played larger roles in the march, is an affront to history.
Sandra Taylor, superintendent of the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail for NPS, said the decision to locate the center at ASU would actually enable the center to best "tell the story" of the march.
"It is a mile off the trail, but I don't think it's going to affect how the story gets told," Taylor said in a phone interview Tuesday.
The project could cost about $12.6 million, some of which ASU has vowed to help raise.
Not everyone was pleased by the decision.
Former Lowndes County Commissioner Bob Mants, who helped lead the voting rights marchers into Montgomery in 1965, said Tuesday afternoon that the decision to locate the interpretive center at ASU amounts to a "gross distortion of history."
"It's a travesty of justice," said Mants, an activist who joined John Lewis and two other officials in leading the march to Montgomery from Selma. "It should have been at St. Jude because that's where the marchers rested for the night, not at ASU."
Mants, a member of an advisory committee named to recommend interpretive center sites, voted to locate it at St. Jude.
"The process by which the sites in Selma and Lowndes County were selected was different from that used for the one in Montgomery," he said. "I have no doubts that politicians interceded in the last one."
But the decision, right or wrong, finally does allow the project to move forward.
Now that the university knows for sure that it will have the center "we can begin to make more reasonable plans," ASU President William Harris said in a Tuesday phone interview.
Harris said the announcement allows ASU to "crank up our engines."
The interpretive center in Lowndes
County already is open, and the center in Selma is slated to open next month. The goal is to open the Montgomery center by the 50th anniversary of the historic march, which would be in March of 2015. Each center tells a portion of the story.
Although many details about the center are still undecided, Taylor said there is agreement on a few basics terms. ASU will provide the land, some transportation provisions for visitors and personnel for security and programming. A research area and archives also will be available for scholarly study.
The building will be at least 15,000 square feet and will sit on about three acres of land that will be near the Nat King Cole house. It is expected to draw tens of thousands of people each year, with annual attendance expected to exceed the 17,000 threshold attained at the Lowndes County center.
But the ASU/NPS partnership hopes other organizations will join with them in making the center successful, according to Taylor and Janice Franklin, who is ASU's dean of library and learning resources and the director of the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture.
Both organizations want to work with other groups such as the City of St. Jude and Mt. Zion AME Zion Church, both of which lost their bid for the interpretive site to ASU.
Both those groups apparently intend to develop their own historical attraction.
"We cannot tell the story without involving the entire Montgomery community, because (the history) encompasses many sites in Montgomery," Franklin said during a phone interview Tuesday.
The march was a "God-inspired movement of a people of faith," and "the opportunity to preserve and honor this history" is a sacred trust for ASU, Franklin said.
NPS announced in 2008 that ASU was the preferred site for the center, and an environmental assessment study that named ASU as the top choice was released to the public in June of last year. Tuesday's ceremony was the official announcement of the center site.
While the cost of construction at ASU is estimated to be about $12.6 million, the Mt. Zion AME Zion Church location would have actually cost about $200,000 less. Building at the former Durr Drug site would cost about $15.9 million, compared with $14.8 million at the St. Jude site.
Congress established the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, which is 54 miles long, in 1996 to commemorate the events, people and route of the 1965 Voting Rights March in Alabama.
NPS also is in the process of developing a radio program and a cell phone tour service, both of which should be available to the public this summer.
"It gives us another way to broaden our audience," Taylor said.