Sixteenth Street Baptist Church's congregation predates its famous building by nearly four decades and its most consequential architect by even longer. The church organized on April 20, 1873, as the First Colored Baptist Church, the first congregation African Americans in Birmingham established for themselves, and grew for a generation before the city ordered its existing building demolished, forcing the congregation to rebuild entirely.
For that new building, church leaders commissioned Wallace A. Rayfield, at the time Alabama's only practicing Black architect. Rayfield had trained formally, earning a certificate in architecture from the Pratt Institute in 1898 and a Bachelor of Architecture from Columbia University the following year, credentials virtually no Black architect working in the American South held at that period. Working with T.C. Windham, a Black contractor who supervised construction, Rayfield designed a building completed in 1911 for twenty six thousand dollars, an eclectic structure blending Byzantine and Romanesque elements, twin corner towers, a central dome and drum, rusticated stone, arched loggias and ornamental brickwork, among the most architecturally ambitious buildings any Black congregation in the region had commissioned to that date.
That building is the same sanctuary the 1963 bombing later damaged and the congregation rebuilt rather than replaced, so the structure standing today is substantially Rayfield's own design, not a later reconstruction. Rayfield went on to design churches and institutional buildings across the South before his death in 1941, but Sixteenth Street remains his most recognized commission, its architectural ambition easy to lose behind the history that happened inside it decades later.