Travel and background

Civil Rights Movement sites on the Register

John HarrisonUpdated October 2026

The National Register includes churches, schools, homes, hotels and whole neighborhoods tied to the Civil Rights Movement. This guide walks through the ones in the ten states this site covers, state by state, using only what their nomination forms and the National Park Service’s own civil rights publications say, and then names the nationally significant sites that lie outside our coverage.

How the sites were identified

The National Park Service, which keeps the Register, treats civil rights history through three channels we used here. Its Civil Rights subject site links to the We Shall Overcome travel itinerary, which the NPS describes as a selection of Register-listed churches, schools, homes and neighborhoods rather than an exhaustive list. The African American Civil Rights Network recognizes related properties and programs; as of October 2026 the NPS page says Congress has not reauthorized the program, which expired on January 8, 2025. And the National Historic Landmarks program published four Civil Rights in America theme studies (public accommodations; public education; voting rights; housing).

We read the public accommodations and public education studies, took the properties they name, and searched the nomination summaries on this site for listings in our ten states whose forms mention the movement directly. Every description below comes from the property’s nomination summary. If you want to check whether a church or school near you is listed, use the address lookup tool.

Massachusetts: Boston

The public education theme study opens its examples of nationally significant properties with Boston. The Charles Sumner House on Hancock Street was home for more than thirty years to the senator who, with Boston’s first Black attorney Robert Morris, argued Roberts v. City of Boston; the nomination recognizes Sumner as among the most outspoken political opponents of slavery and a backer of civil rights for freedmen.

Nearby on Beacon Hill, the African Meetinghouse was built in 1806 entirely by Black labor for Boston’s first Black church. The nomination calls it the oldest surviving African American church building in the country and records that the New England Anti-Slavery Society was founded there in 1832. In Great Barrington, the W. E. B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite preserves the foundation and chimney of the farmhouse where the NAACP co-founder spent his first seventeen years.

New York: Harlem

The James Weldon Johnson House on West 135th Street was Johnson’s home from 1925 to 1938 while he headed the NAACP, organizing branches, backing the Silent Protest Parade and lobbying for an anti-lynching bill. The Hotel Theresa admitted African American guests from 1940, became known as the “Waldorf of Harlem,” and later housed Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity. The Dunbar Apartments, finished in 1928, were the first cooperative apartment project built for Black residents and counted W. E. B. Du Bois among their tenants. The Apollo Theater is listed for its role in Harlem’s emergence as a cultural center after 1935.

Pennsylvania: Philadelphia

Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church stands on a lot Richard Allen bought in 1793 after leading a walkout from a segregated congregation; the nomination calls it the oldest parcel of real estate continuously owned by Black people in the United States. The Marian Anderson House was the contralto’s home and business office from 1924, and the form ties it to her role in the civil rights movement. The Paul Robeson House in West Philadelphia was his longest-occupied residence, from 1965 until his death in 1976, when civil rights leaders still visited to seek his endorsement.

Virginia: Farmville, New Kent and Richmond

The public education theme study names Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville as one of the nationally significant school desegregation properties. On April 23, 1951, students led by Barbara Johns struck over conditions at the overcrowded Black high school; with NAACP lawyers their protest became one of the cases combined as Brown v. Board of Education. The county then closed its public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate.

Seven miles apart on Route 249, New Kent School and George W. Watkins School were designated a National Historic Landmark for Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), the Supreme Court ruling that required school boards to take active steps to integrate rather than rely on freedom-of-choice plans.

In Richmond, the Jackson Ward Historic District nomination was later expanded to record the neighborhood’s law offices, medical offices, insurance companies, churches and homes linked to the civil rights era. Maggie L. Walker High School was the city’s first vocational high school for African American students and the first city school with a Black principal and faculty. Virginia Union University grew from two Baptist schools founded to educate freed people after the Civil War. At Hampton, the Hampton Institute campus, where Booker T. Washington studied, is also an NHL cited in the theme study.

North Carolina: Greensboro

The public accommodations theme study places the student-led sit-in that began at Greensboro’s F. W. Woolworth on February 1, 1960, on its National Historic Landmarks study list, recording the building as listed within the Downtown Greensboro Historic District in 1982. The Downtown Greensboro Historic District nomination summary notes the Woolworth building’s association with the 1960 sit-ins. The NPS database now also carries the F. W. Woolworth Company Building as a National Historic Landmark entry; that individual entry does not yet have a page on this site.

Georgia: Atlanta, Albany and Midway

The theme study lists the Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic District (NHL, 1974) among the nationally significant properties: it includes King’s 1895 birthplace at 501 Auburn Avenue, Ebenezer Baptist Church, completed in 1922, and his grave. The overlapping Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site and Preservation District is the NPS unit. Along the same avenue, the Sweet Auburn Historic District preserves the four blocks that once anchored Black business life, including the Atlanta Life Insurance Company and Big Bethel AME Church. Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first public high school for Black students, counts King among its graduates. Collier Heights was developed through African American initiative for African American families and housed Ralph D. Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Sr.

In Albany, Mount Zion Baptist Church hosted the Albany Movement’s first public mass meeting on November 25, 1961, where the SNCC Freedom Singers performed for the first time; the theme study put it on the NHL study list. In Midway, the Dorchester Academy Boys’ Dormitory was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s main training site for the Citizenship Education Program, and SCLC officials met there in January 1963 to plan the Birmingham Campaign.

Texas: Austin, San Antonio and Houston

The Teachers State Association of Texas Building in East Austin housed an organization of Black educators that supported Heman Sweatt’s case against segregation at the University of Texas; John S. Chase, the first African American licensed architect in Texas, designed it. The George Washington Carver Library in Austin served Black residents until the city desegregated its libraries in December 1951, and San Antonio’s Carver Library and Auditorium served as the Black community’s educational and social center until the city integrated public facilities in 1954. Houston’s Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1866, is the surviving landmark of a Black settlement erased by downtown expansion. The NPS itinerary also features the Juanita J. Craft House in Texas, which does not yet have a page on this site.

Illinois, Ohio and California

Three Chicago NHLs sit on Martin Luther King Drive: the Ida B. Wells-Barnett House, home of the anti-lynching journalist and NAACP co-founder; the Robert S. Abbott House, home of the founder of the Chicago Defender; and the Oscar Stanton De Priest House, home of the first Black person elected to Congress from a northern state. In Ohio, the public education study cites Oberlin College, which made the education of Black students a matter of policy before the Civil War, and Akron’s Wesley Temple AME Church is where the local NAACP chapter was organized. In Los Angeles, Second Baptist Church hosted NAACP conventions and raised money for the Legal Defense Fund during Brown, and the Somerville Hotel hosted the first West Coast national NAACP convention in 1928.

Outside the site’s current coverage

The public accommodations theme study’s “properties recognized as nationally significant” are mostly in Alabama: Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (Montgomery), Bethel Baptist Church, Parsonage and Guard House and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (Birmingham), plus the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Its NHL study list adds Mount Zion Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, the Anniston and Birmingham bus stations, First Baptist Church in Montgomery, the Jackson, Mississippi Greyhound station, Shiloh Church in Albany (Georgia, but not on this site), the Birmingham Civil Rights Historic District and the Gaston Motel. The public education study’s examples include Sumner and Monroe Elementary Schools in Topeka and Central High School in Little Rock. The We Shall Overcome itinerary features the Elizabeth Harden Gilmore House in West Virginia and the Malcolm X House Site in Omaha. None of these has a page here yet; we name them so the picture is not misleadingly tilted toward the states we cover.

For how any of these places reached the Register, see how the National Register works and the four criteria and seven aspects of integrity.

General information, not legal or tax advice. Researched from the sources above and drafted with AI assistance; published under the editor's name, corrections welcome. See the editorial policy.