The church's story begins in the aftermath of the Civil War. In 1866, a combined congregation of African-American and white Methodists in Selma separated by race - a split replicated across the South as Reconstruction redrew the lines of worship and community. The Black congregation built its first sanctuary on this site in 1869. By 1908, they had outgrown it, and builder A. J. Farley designed the imposing structure that stands today: a large masonry building of red brick with white stone trim, shaped as a Greek cross with Byzantine influences. The facade features three rounded arches recessed behind an arcade, flanked by a pair of square towers topped with octagonal lanterns and cupolas. It is a building that commands attention, which is precisely what it would be called upon to do.

In 1964, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose Brown Chapel as its Selma headquarters. The choice was strategic: the church was large enough to hold mass meetings, located in a Black neighborhood northeast of downtown, and led by a congregation willing to risk everything. For the first three months of 1965, Brown Chapel became the nerve center of the voting rights campaign. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from its pulpit. Organizers planned strategy in its offices. Volunteers gathered in its pews before heading out to face arrest at the Dallas County Courthouse, where Sheriff Jim Clark's deputies turned away Black citizens attempting to register. The church parking lot became a staging area; its steps became a podium for speeches that would echo through American history.

Bloody Sunday was not the first confrontation, nor would it be the last. But the images from March 7, 1965 - John Lewis with a fractured skull, Amelia Boynton Robinson beaten unconscious, clouds of tear gas drifting over fleeing marchers - shocked the conscience of a nation that had been content to look away. The marchers had left Brown Chapel's doors and walked six blocks south to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. On the far side, mounted troopers and Sheriff Clark's posse were waiting. The attack lasted minutes. The retreat back to Brown Chapel took longer, with injured marchers staggering through the streets of Selma. Two weeks later, on March 21, the marchers set out again from Brown Chapel - this time with federal protection, 3,200 strong, completing the march to Montgomery over five days.

Brown Chapel was added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage on June 16, 1976, and declared a National Historic Landmark on February 4, 1982. The street out front was renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. In 2022, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the church on its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, drawing attention to the deterioration threatening this irreplaceable building. The church remains an active congregation, still holding services in the same sanctuary where freedom songs once shook the rafters before marchers walked out to face dogs and fire hoses. It stands six blocks from the bridge, a distance that once took extraordinary courage to cross. The twin towers are visible above the neighborhood rooftops, marking the spot where ordinary people decided that the right to vote was worth bleeding for.