Bricklayers Hall

In 1954 the local Black bricklayers' union put up a two-story brick building with a flat roof on South Union Street in Centennial Hill, a historically Black part of Montgomery, Alabama. It held offices and the union's hall. In February 1956 the Montgomery Improvement Association, the group that organized and sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott, moved its headquarters here. That connection earned the building its 2020 listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

Why a union hall

MIA leaders wanted a headquarters they couldn't be pushed out of. They looked for a building held by an established Black organization that answered to no white backers. A Black union that had built its own hall met that test. Martin Luther King, Jr. later wrote that the white community couldn't force the MIA out of this building, because most of the union's members and every one of its officers were Black.

The association moved into first-floor offices. King and the staff kept the books there, answered and sent letters, scheduled meetings and wrote reports. From June 1956 the monthly MIA Newsletter, with Jo Ann Robinson as editor, came off the press at the headquarters. Upstairs, the union's meeting room hosted gatherings and became a handout point where boycotters picked up shoes and other supplies.

The women who set it in motion

The protest started years before the MIA existed. Robinson, a professor at Alabama State, led the Women's Political Council, which began formal complaints about bus seating rules and the treatment of Black riders in 1950. Council members sat down with the mayor, the city commissioners and bus company officials. They got a few concessions, such as extra stops in Black neighborhoods and requests that Black passengers be treated more courteously, and most of those faded. With the city and the company doing nothing, the council started planning a boycott.

Police arrested Rosa L. Parks on Thursday, December 1, 1955, after she refused to give her seat to a white passenger. Robinson and the council stayed up all night producing flyers that asked Black residents to stay off the buses beginning Monday, and passed them out the next day. Robinson brought in community leaders. Black ministers announced it from the pulpit on Sunday, and others began working out rides for people who commuted long distances by bus. On Monday, December 5, nearly every Black resident of the city stayed off the buses.

Organizing for the long haul

Ministers and community leaders formed the MIA that same Monday. Its jobs were to negotiate for the Black community with city government and the bus company and to keep the protest alive. King, of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was elected president. A 35-member executive board brought in ministers, community leaders and activists, with Robinson and Irene West seated for the Women's Political Council. Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy of First Baptist Church, an early supporter, became vice president in mid-1956.

City commissioners and the bus company turned down the MIA's demands, so the boycott went on for months. Mass meetings at local churches carried news and kept people committed. Rufus Lewis chaired the Transportation Committee, which ran a carpool network of more than 300 private cars, 43 dispatch stations and 42 pickup spots. National press attention brought gifts of cash and vehicles, and the MIA and local churches added paid drivers in station wagons. In February 1956 King and others were arrested under Alabama's anti-boycott laws, and that fall white officials tried to ban the carpools.

The court ruling that ended it

In June 1956 a three-judge U.S. District Court panel ruled by majority that Montgomery's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. State and city lawyers appealed, and in November the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision in Gayle v. Browder. The boycott ended on December 21, 1956, when Black riders got back on integrated city buses. The ruling established nationally that segregated public transportation was illegal, and Black communities across the South cited it to fight segregation in public transportation and public facilities.

After the boycott

The MIA turned to wider equal rights work in Montgomery and around Alabama in the late 1950s. Lewis headed its Committee on Registering and Voting, which pushed Black residents to vote. The association also paid to fix Montgomery churches that whites had bombed because their pastors and members backed the movement. King stepped down as president in 1960 and moved to Atlanta. Abernathy took over, and the MIA had left the hall by 1961.

Charles S. Conley, Jr., a lawyer, rented an office in the building from 1961 to 1965. During those years he worked on several cases that produced federal court orders forcing state and local authorities to stop discriminating in public libraries, in jury selection and on interstate bus lines. He was also co-counsel in New York Times v. Sullivan before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bricklayers Union No. 3 held on to the building after 1965 and kept using the second floor as its meeting hall. Downstairs it leased offices to a string of tenants that included a hair salon, a dentist and a school trophy agency. Percy Doak, the union's longtime secretary, died in 1967. Money got tight in the 1970s and 1980s, and the property collected several tax liens. In August 2023 the hall was bought by GirlTREK, a public health movement for Black women.

Finding it

Bricklayers Hall is at 530 South Union Street in Montgomery, Alabama.