Arthur George Gaston was born on July 4, 1892, raised by grandparents who had been enslaved. At thirteen, he followed his mother to Birmingham. He worked the coal mines, then noticed that poor Black families could not afford decent funerals. In 1923, he founded the Booker T. Washington Insurance Company. From there he built an empire: a savings and loan bank, a business college, a construction company, real estate holdings, two cemeteries, and two radio stations. By the time he built the A.G. Gaston Motel in 1954, he was Birmingham's first Black millionaire, worth an estimated forty million dollars. The motel offered first-class lodging and dining to Black travelers in a city where segregation barred them from white-owned hotels. It was dignity made concrete -- clean rooms, good food, a place where Black visitors could be treated as guests, not second-class citizens.

When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose Birmingham as the target of its most ambitious campaign in the spring of 1963, the Gaston Motel became its headquarters. Room 30 on the second floor served as the command center -- the "war room" -- where strategy sessions ran deep into the night. The campaign was called Project C, for confrontation, designed to challenge Birmingham's segregated businesses through nonviolent direct action during the busy Easter shopping season. It was in Room 30 that King decided to march in defiance of a state court injunction, knowing he would be arrested. The resulting jail stay produced one of the most important documents in American civil rights history. Gaston himself, though sometimes criticized as an accommodationist, used his wealth to bail King and other protesters out of jail at crucial moments. The millionaire businessman and the preacher worked different sides of the same fight.

On the evening of May 10, 1963, an agreement was announced in the Gaston Motel's courtyard: Birmingham's white business leaders would begin desegregating lunch counters, fitting rooms, and drinking fountains. The next night, white supremacist terrorists answered. Shortly before midnight on May 11, a bomb thrown from a moving car detonated beneath Room 30, tearing a door-sized hole in the west wall of the building. Four people were slightly injured. King and Abernathy were unhurt -- they had recently departed the motel. The bombing was intended to destroy the movement's leadership; instead, it ignited demonstrations across the city and solidarity protests across the country. The violence at the Gaston Motel and the images from Birmingham's fire hoses and police dogs helped push the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress.

After the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, the Gaston Motel lost its essential purpose. Black travelers could stay anywhere. Business declined through the 1970s, and from 1982 to 1996 the building served as senior housing. But the motel's significance was not forgotten. The National Trust for Historic Preservation designated it one of America's National Treasures. In January 2017, President Barack Obama established the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, with the Gaston Motel at its heart, jointly managed by the National Park Service and the City of Birmingham. After extensive restoration, the motel opened to the public for history tours in the summer of 2023. Room 30 is preserved. The hole in the wall has been repaired, but the story it tells has not been smoothed over.