BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - A grouping of Alabama sites important during the Civil Rights Movement has made the United States tentative list of potential nominees for designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Should the Alabama sites be included in the World Heritage List, places central to the state's Civil Rights legacy would be recognized as culturally important to the rest of the world and worthy of protection.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Alabama played a central role in the movement to end Jim Crow laws and segregation of African Americans, with marches and protest actions drawing national and worldwide interest in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, and other locations.
According to the City of Birmingham, several sites in Birmingham "were recently confirmed on the short list (14 nominees) for the Department of Interiors' possible submission for UNESCO's World Heritage Site designation."
Alabama sites have made the U.S.'s tentative list before. In 2008, three churches - Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, and Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery - were grouped together as Civil Rights Movement Sites.
Alabama's entry was in danger of falling off the tentative list, but the City of Birmingham and other state entities are working on a new, expanded application that includes more significant sites around the country.
"The City is currently preparing its full admission package and is expanding it to include Civil Rights sites from around the state," a release from the City of Birmingham stated Wednesday. "A team of experts are being assembled to present the most cohesive and historic group under the one admission. The goal is to present to the World Heritage Committee in 2016."
In a release, Birmingham Mayor William Bell lauded Birmingham's role in the Movement and stated that a designation as a World Heritage Site could translate "into cultural tourism and a significant economic impact."
"We are working to establish Birmingham as an international destination for Human Rights," Bell said. "The World Heritage Site list is step one to that goal."
"My staff will be working with the Birmingham Convention and Visitor's Bureau, the State of Alabama Department of Tourism, the Governor's Office and Congresswoman Sewell's office to make this happen," Bell continued. "We will be calling on the local universities and colleges to provide supporting materials as we make the case that the Civil Rights Legacy born here in Birmingham and throughout the State of Alabama is worthy of this nomination."
The process to make the World Heritage List is a long one. UN member states (in Alabama's case, the United States of America) prepare a tentative list of sites it thinks are worthy of World Heritage Site designation. This list can be years in the making. Each nation then selects up to two sites from its tentative list as nominees for inclusion as a potential World Heritage Site. Entries must be on the tentative list for a year before being nominated, and countries can only nominate two sites a year.
These nominees are then evaluated by one of two UN committees: The International Council on Monuments and Sites for sites of cultural significance, and the World Conservation Union for natural sites. The committee evaluations are forwarded to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which meets once a year to determine which - if any - new sites should be inscribed on the World Heritage List.
21 countries are elected members of the World Heritage Committee. The U.S. is not currently one of them. Inclusion on the tentative list or final listing as a World Heritage Site does not grant any powers over the property to UNESCO - the sites are still only subject to U.S. laws.
U.S. Congresswoman Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, stated that she was "excited" about Birmingham's inclusion on the list.
"Such a designation would solidify Birmingham's place as a site of historic and cultural significance around the world," Sewell said. "This designation would emphasize Alabama's rich civil rights history and the role it played as a catalyst in the world's pursuit of social justice."
Most of the 21 U.S. sites currently on the World Heritage List are of natural history significance - Yellowstone National Park, Mammoth Cave National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Everglades National Park, to name a few - but there are seven cultural sites, including the Statue of Liberty, Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, and others.
Stephen Morris, the chief of the National Park Service's Office of International Affairs, spoke to the 2008 Alabama sites in an e-mail to AL.com. His office handles the tentative list in the U.S.
"The three churches [Bethel, Sixteenth Street, and Dexter, from the 2008 tentative list] are, in effect, a place-holder on the Tentative List for a serial nomination of a larger grouping of discontiguous sites associated with the Civil Rights Movement," Morris wrote. "At the moment, the Mayor Bell and his staff are exploring the possibility of organizing an effort to identify other key sites of the Civil Rights Movement that might be included in such a nomination."
"By necessity, if a decision is made to go forward, it will be a multi-year effort involving most likely a large group of stakeholders in different States," Morris wrote. "The role of my office, as the staff office for the U.S. World Heritage program, is to provide guidance and oversight to US nominations."
According to Morris, a law preventing payment of U.S. dues to UNESCO could cause problems for any U.S. nominations.
"There are complications with all future US nominations due to the fact that the US is not paying our UNESCO dues and has been in arrears since 2011," Morris wrote in an e-mail.