- The church had been a meeting place for leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and others seeking to end segregation and register African-Americans to vote in Birmingham. No American of conscience who remembers those days can forget the horrible poison of pure hate it exposed in our society. Only a short time before, the Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, had stated that what was needed “was a few high-class funerals” to counter the movement towards integration. [download id=”198″]