Ben Moore Hotel, 902 High Street, Montgomery

Source document Quoted word for word from HABS AL-1003. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

The Ben Moore Hotel was one of the sites of historic meetings between representatives of the black and white populations of Montgomery during the dawn of the Civil Rights era. The hotel was still new in when Rev. Martin Luther King pastor of what is now Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, moved into the Church Parsonage one block north and became a regular customer of Malden Brothers Barbershop housed on the Jackson Street side of the Hotel. There it stood when the Bus Boycott ignited in serving as a natural meeting place and offered refuge during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Selma-to-Montgomery March.

The Ben Moore Hotel is in Centennial Hill (the corner of Jackson and High Streets), the prestigious Black business district and neighborhood that traces its history to the Reconstruction days of the It was designed and built by Brewer Building Service Company, Paul Brewer owner/operator, one of the premiere African-American design-build firms in the city. The four-story hotel offered lodging and a vibrant social life free from the bigotry and hostility of the and Facing High Street with a 33' frontage the hotel included the new quarters of the Majestic Caf on the first floor, twenty-eight guest rooms on the second and third floors, and a roof garden on the top floor that housed the Afro Club equipped with a bandstand, booths and other facilities for entertaining.

Cat managed the Roof and entertainment at the Afro Club featured performers such as Ike and Tina Turner, King and Clarence Carter to name a few. Locals including Claude Shannon, Bobby Jackson and the Sneakers, King Tut, and Bobby Moore also performed on the Roof. Even though the Elks Club, Citizens Club, the Derby and Club 400 were prime venues, the Roof was special for it offered the opportunity to party with a view of the Montgomery skyline. Description: The Ben Moore Hotel is a four-story streamlined Modern brick commercial block with flat roof of tar composition. The building is ornamented with brick string courses to create a frieze over the first story and banding for the windows.

The High Street fa ade includes on the first floor a canted recessed double wood panel door with transom, wraparound suspended awing, and three openings fitted with glass block. The corner is clipped on the first story only to include an entry flanked by glass block sidelights. The second floor has two windows; over the BEN MOORE HOTEL HABS No. AL-1003 (Page 2) clipped entry is a twenty-light metal casement with four-light operable crank-out casement windows to each side, eight fixed to the center and a top row of fixed lights. There is a ten-light casement window to the inside, with a similar arrangement of operable section and fixed lights above. The pattern is repeated on the third story, while a continuous row of casement windows appears on the fourth. On the long S.

Jackson Street fa ade are elevated doorways into a stairwell, and three doorways paired with plate-glass displayed windows that lead into individual businesses. The second and third story windows are alternating ten-light casement windows (as previously described) and small three-light windows. The first floor was once occupied by the Majestic Caf . All the original seating and original tables are still there. On the second and third floor were twenty-eight rooms. The suites, on one side of the hall, all had their own bathrooms and showers. The other side were the standard rooms where guests shared a communal hallway bathroom. The star of the hotel was the rooftop garden referred to as the Afro Club at night, a place where some of the top black musicians came to perform.

Extending on the Jackson Street side the hotel housed three businesses: Veterans Real Estate/Ace Specialty Company (George J. Norman, Malden Brothers Barber Shop (Spurgeon, Stephen and Nelson) and Bonner s Photography (A. B. Bonner). History: The Ben Moore Hotel was designed and built by Paul Brewer of Brewer Buildings Service Company, at a cost of opening its doors to African Americans on Sunday, September 23, Matthew Franklin Moore named the Ben Moore Hotel for his father, a slave who was born in Alabama on August 8, and died December 1, in Montgomery. It was the first licensed hotel in Montgomery to serve Blacks and the first high rise outside downtown. Until it opened Blacks visiting the city had to rely on family, friends, or a rented room.

The one business remaining in the hotel is a piece of history, The Malden Brothers Barbershop. The evocative barbershop remains intact, full of Civil Rights-era news clippings, pictures and portraits, collected and displayed by Malden. They include huge photographs of often-forgotten, but well-documented showdown between blacks and the police over equal rights to service in the Montgomery County Courthouse eatery, the Selma to Montgomery March of and one of its most famous customers, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was there that he received one of his final haircuts. The Ben Moore Hotel had its heyday from its construction in the early until when Civil Rights law opened mainstream hotels to African Americans.

Nelson Malden recalls the hotel playing a pivotal role in organizing non-violent protests when he was a young college student at Alabama State College including the student sit-in at the Montgomery County Court House eatery showdown between blacks and the police over equal rights to service. Large numbers of students came to Montgomery to participate in the protest from San Francisco BEN MOORE HOTEL HABS No. AL-1003 (Page 3) State University supporting the local college students. Since there was limited access to mainstream lodging, the students claimed that wherever they stayed, they needed to stay together for safety and protection. Mr.

Andrew Goldsmith, the manager of the Ben Moore Hotel, heard about the students housing need and according to Nelson Malden allowed four kids per room in the hotel. Later, when government officials found out Malden was fined. By then, however, the protest had already happened. On March 19, an article appeared in The Journal Herald (Dayton, OH) For Hundreds in Rights Fight, Home is where your Bedroll Is by Staff Writer Tim Bleck in Montgomery on assignment. He writes: Hundreds of young civil rights workers who have been flowing in and out of here continuously since last weekend in a square block of Jackson and Highland streets Here they have bedded down indiscriminate in an incredible clutter of bedrolls, sleeping bags, blankets and cots.

Over 200 piled into the four-story brick Ben Moore hotel where they sleep five and six to a room. The article has photos of a white man and white female identified as David Thomson and his wife Barbara Thomson. As prominent members in the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee activities in Dayton, David was considered the spokesperson for the Dayton area group. The article reports: 30 of the people are Yellow Springs, Antioch, Wilberforce and an undetermined number from the Dayton area among the 88 people jailed yesterday during a demonstration at the Capitol. Those not in the church, the street, the jail pack the caf in the Ben Moore hotel where they subsist on a diet of beer, soda and specialties from the grill. The property is owned by Edna E. and Paytie Davie.

Source document Quoted word for word from HABS AL-1003. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

Bleck, Tim. For Hundreds in Rights Fight, Home is where your Bedroll Is, The Journal Herald, March 19, Historic Hotel Slips Away Montgomery Advertiser July 3, Hotel to Open Alabama Journal, July 7, Malden, Nelson, owner Malden Brothers Barber Shop (Ben Moore Hotel), and other members of the Centennial Hill Community, interview with author. Montgomery County Property Records BEN MOORE HOTEL HABS No. AL-1003 (Page 4) National Register of Historic Places, Ben Moore Hotel, Montgomery Alabama, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior (unpublished/unsubmitted).

Source document Quoted word for word from HABS AL-1003. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

The documentation of the Ben Moore Hotel and the other resources within the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium (managed by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute) was jointly sponsored by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Catherine C. Lavoie, Chief, of the National Park Service s Heritage Documentation Programs, and the Consortium, Priscilla Hancock Cooper, Project Director. Regional coordination was provided by Athena F. Richardson, Consortium Operations Manager; Georgette M. Norman, Consortium Project Historian and Joyce O Neal, Consortium Selma and Black Belt Coordinator.

Financial support was provided by the Kaplan Fund, Amy Freitag, Executive Director, and Will Raynolds, Program Director, Heritage Conservation; and by the American Institute of Architects, Robert Ivy, Chief Executive Officer. The documentation was undertaken during spring and summer and was organized and overseen by Catherine C. Lavoie and Jarob J. Ortiz, HDP photographer. The photographs were taken by Jarob J. Ortiz. The historical reports were prepared by Georgette M. Norman, Project Historian, with assistance by Project Intern Amelia Chase. The reports were edited by Catherine C. Lavoie.