Your walk brings you to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, a congregation whose story is braided through Montgomery's history. This is the church affiliated with the Progressive National Baptist Convention that was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974 for its importance in the civil rights movement and American history. In 1978 its official name was changed to the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was pastor here and helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 during the civil rights era.
The congregation itself was organized in 1877 by freedmen and free people of color, first known as the Second Colored Baptist Church, with Charles Octavius Boothe as the founding pastor. The church trustees paid $270 on January 30, 1879, for a lot at the corner of what is now Dexter Avenue and Decatur Street. On January 1, 2008, the U.S. Government submitted the church to UNESCO as part of an envisaged future World Heritage Site nomination; it remains on the UNESCO Tentative List of World Heritage Sites.
Notice the Alabama State Capitol just steps away, close enough to hold both church and government in the same view.