There was a time when Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama was a symbol of all that was wrong with the American South. In the early 1960s, television reports of civil rights protesters battling police dogs and firehoses burned a negative image of Birmingham into the national consciousness.

And across the street from the park stands the massive Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, an imposing brick structure that is also a memorial to the tragic 1963 bombing that took the lives of four youn...