Short Takes

Okefenokee selected over B’ham church bombings for World Heritage List

January 13, 2025January 13, 2025

By David Pendered

Jan. 13 – The Okefenokee Swamp was chosen over the site of the fatal bombing at Birmingham’s 16^th Street Baptist Church and 17 other sites for nomination to the United Nation’s World Heritage List.

Advocates of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge helped sway the site-selection committee, which is overseen by the US Department of the Interior.

The US Department of the Interior nominated Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge to the United Nation’s World Heritage List. (Credit: David Pendered. 2020)

The swamp received “many” supportive comments during a public comment period in 2023, compared to a level of support for other sites, “in particular sites associated with Civil Rights history,” according to a notice in the Federal Register, the government’s daily journal. Public comments are an important consideration of the Federal Interagency Panel for World Heritage.

The UN’s World Heritage Committee is to consider this nomination and others at a session expected to convene in mid-2026.

Three civil rights sites, all in Alabama and under the heading of “Civil Rights Movement Sites,” are on the U.S. World Heritage Tentative List. Because they are on the list, they remain eligible for future nomination along with other sites that could be added to the category:

16^th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, where four girls were killed in 1963 in a dynamite bombing committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan;
Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Montgomery, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as 20^th pastor and was a center of planning for protests including the Montgomery bus boycott;
Bethel Baptist Church, Birmingham, the site of three bombings, including Christmas Day 1956, and a center of the Freedom Riders during the leadership of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

Other US sites that were not selected and remain on the Tentative List include:

Mount Vernon; Ellis Island; Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Central Park; Brooklyn Bridge; Moravian Bethlehem district in Pennsylvania; Petrified Forest in Arizona; Marine sanctuaries and more in Central California; Big Bend National Park in Texas.

In announcing the selection of the swamp, outgoing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement: “This nomination serves as a recognition of the refuge’s unparalleled natural and cultural significance, and of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees, local communities and Tribes that have stewarded these lands for generations.”

For the entire US World Heritage Tentative List, click here.