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City Celebrates Black Business Month on Birmingham’s Historic Black Main Street

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Birmingham Times
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1878
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The Masonic Temple sits in the heart of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument District at the corner of 4th Avenue North and 17th Street. (FILE)

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For over a century, Birmingham’s Black entrepreneurs have been bringing dreams to life.

When segregation severely limited Black Birmingham’s access to white-owned businesses and banks, the community built its own. For decades, these places thrived.

Walk down 4th Avenue North today, and you’ll pass storefronts, a theater marquee, and a few surviving signs of a district that hummed from morning to midnight. Barbershops and beauty shops. Restaurants and hotels. A pharmacy. A library. Ballrooms filled up on Saturday nights.

This Black Business Month, we’re looking back at how 4th Avenue became the economic heart of Black Birmingham, and how the Crossroads project is supporting what comes next.

Building a Black Business District

A 1944 photograph of 4th Ave N and 18th St in downtown Birmingham. (File)

Birmingham was barely a decade old when Black residents started building their own institutions. From the very beginning, this community worked to build wealth on its own terms.

The Penny Savings Bank is a good example of just how deliberate that was. Founded in 1890 by Reverend William R. Pettiford, it started with a teller accepting deposits at a folding table and grew into the second-largest Black-owned bank in the country by 1907, writing mortgages, funding homeownership, and keeping Black dollars circulating within the community it served.

When the bank closed in 1915, the building didn’t sit empty. It was bought outright by a Black-owned fraternal organization and kept serving the community for another half-century as offices for doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs.

By the early 20th century, that foundation had grown into a full commercial district along 4th Avenue North. The seven-story Prince Hall Grand Lodge, known as the Colored Masonic Temple, anchored the street, its ground floor packed with restaurants, hotels, shoe parlors, and beauty shops. Upstairs, the Lodge housed a library, a pharmacy, and offices for Black doctors, lawyers, and professionals. It wasn’t just a building. It was a community hub.

A few blocks away, marquee lights shined at the Carver Theatre and the Champion Theatre. The Acqua Lounge and the Masonic ballrooms filled with dancing on weekend nights. Photographs from the 1940s and ’50s show 4th Avenue at its best. Men in bow ties and women in their Sunday finest stroll along a street that was vibrant, self-sustaining, and sophisticated.

The Businessman Who Built an Empire

Few people are more closely tied to the success of Birmingham’s Black business district than A.G. Gaston. What started in 1923 as an insurance company grew into a diverse and robust business empire. At one point, he even purchased the former Penny Savings Bank headquarters on 18th Street to house his own business ventures. One address, three generations of Black-owned institutions.

A.G. Gaston

His impact is why The A.G. Gaston Building on 4th Avenue has become a symbol of what Black entrepreneurship in Birmingham could achieve.

Gaston would go on to build the A.G. Gaston Motel, which later served as headquarters for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the 1963 Birmingham Campaign.

Black business success and the fight for civil rights were never separate stories in this city. Gaston wasn’t alone. Up and down 4th Avenue, Black entrepreneurs, architects, and builders created a business district that thrived and stood on its own.

A Legacy Worth Honoring

The success of the Civil Rights Movement and integration created unexpected economic challenges for Black-owned businesses. As legal barriers fell, Black customers had more options and Black-owned shops had trouble offering the selection and discounts of the larger white-owned stores.

Then, in the 1960s and ’70s, Interstate 65 cut straight through Birmingham’s Smithfield and Graymont neighborhoods. The road separated them from downtown and severed the routes that had connected the downtown businesses to the very neighborhoods that supported them.

While 4th Avenue hasn’t fully recovered the density and vibrancy of its heyday, you can still feel its hum. Businesses like Green Acres Café and the Carver Theatre still serve the community, a living link between the district’s past and its present. The Prince Hall Grand Lodge still stands. So does the story.

The Carver Theatre hosted The Civil Rights Crossroads Community Meetings in 2025. (Provided)

Investing in 4th Avenue’s Next Generation

That’s where the Birmingham Civil Rights Crossroads project comes in.

The Crossroads corridor connects directly to the heart of the historic 4th Avenue business district, and the design responds to it. Wider sidewalks. Public art. Wayfinding and interpretive signage that tell the lively story of entrepreneurship and community. Streetscape improvements built to support small business activation and draw cultural tourism back to the corridor.

This isn’t about replacing or replicating what 4th Avenue was. It’s about creating the conditions for a new generation of entrepreneurs to do exactly what the last one did: build something special.

Walk the Path. Honor the Past. On 4th Avenue, that means celebrating those who built a business district out of sheer will, and investing in the ones who will build what comes next.

Learn More

The Birmingham Civil Rights Crossroads project is a $21.6 million federal RAISE grant investment creating 3.16 miles of Complete Streets connecting Smithfield, Graymont, and the Civil Rights District to downtown Birmingham. Sign up for project updates to stay connected as design moves toward the 2026 demonstration project and 2027–2029 construction.

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