Edistone Hotel's History Saved

0:00The Edestone Hotel in Selma, Alabama, built back in 1855, almost got torn down this year in 2025. This spot holds heavy history, from being the biggest slave market in Dallas County before the Civil War, to housing the Friedman's Bureau after. Helping newly-free black folks with food, clothes, and shelter. By the 1870s, its owners started welcoming guests of all races equally. Right near the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where bloody Sunday went down on March 7, 1965, with over 500 civil rights marchers. Getting beaten by state troopers on their way to Montgomery. The Conservation Fund jumped in through their legacy places initiative and bought the property to save it from the wrecking ball. Philip Howard, who runs that initiative, caused it unfathomable that such a key piece of American history nearly vanished. He stresses this hotel treated formerly enslaved people like humans, for the first time in the South, and saving it keeps those stories alive for. Everyone. The fund has protected other black heritage sites too, like Zora Neal Hurston's last home.

1:06The Freedom Riders monument in Alabama, and the Bin Moore. Hotel in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. got haircuts and civil rights meetings happened upstairs. Howard, a son of Alabama's black belt and former Marine, says preserving these places matters now more than ever as eyewitnesses pass on. Without the sites, history gets rewritten, but groups like his keep building coalitions to hold the truth steady. That's the story for today. Birmingham News Today, driven by AI.