A famous hotel integral to the Civil Rights Movement is being restored to its former glory as part of a 2017 effort by President Obama to establish the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument. 

Although it is currently in a state of disrepair, The A.G. Gaston Motel was featured in the The Negro Motorist Green Book and was well-known in the 1960s for hosting luminaries like Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington and Aretha Franklin.

Most notably, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed at the hotel in 1963 during the thick of the Civil Rights Movement. He even held a press conference outside of the hotel ahead of protests against segregation.

A prominent black businessman by the name of A.G. Gaston built the motel back in 1954. Throughout its existence, it has managed to survive a lot including a bombing after the MLK Jr. press conference. Gaston is remembered for fondly by many for bailing Dr. King Jr. out of a Birmingham jail in 1963.

The two-story house was famous across town as a place that provided top-of-the-line amenities to Black people, which was rare in segregated Alabama. According to the project's 87-year-old superintendent James Poindexter, the hotel served as a sort of watering hole for many of the city's black residents,

“This was a state of the art hotel whether you were Black or white,” Poindexter told the Philadelphia Tribune on Wednesday.

According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the hotel "stood at the center of several significant chapters of the Civil Rights movement."

"During the spring of 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stayed in room 30 – a 'war room' for the movement’s top leaders. This is where he made the decision to defy a court’s injunction and submit himself to being jailed to show solidarity with local protesters," they write on their website.

"As the site for high-level civil rights strategy meetings and events, the Gaston played an important role in the movement. It also stands as a historic monument to black entrepreneurship during the period of racial segregation."

Eventually, the motel fell out of use and was turned into an apartment building. Roger Hunt, the man in charge of the first round of work, said the hotel was in terrible condition and needed a raft of upgrades to restore it to its former glory. 

“We have the original plans to go by,” he said in an interview with the Philadelphia Tribune. "It’s in terrible shape now, but it’s structurally sound.”

The work on the hotel is only one part of a larger, $10 million project to reinvigorate the area around it. Right now, the building is missing windows and has been partially damaged by bad weather. Both Hunt and Poindexter said they would rebuild the hotel as a replica of what it once was. 

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