The New Zion Baptist Church

The church did more than host one meeting. Across from Shakespear Park, New Zion under the Rev. A. L. Davis took part in or helped found the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, the NAACP Youth Council, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Consumers League of Greater New Orleans, making it a base for protest and civic organizing. The pastors' meeting of February 14, 1957, with Martin Luther King Jr. present, produced a group first called the Southern Leadership Conference, a precursor of the SCLC. Later that year the pastors elected King president.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 0.7 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 1.8 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 1.8 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 1.9 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) — 0.5 mi
• Mass Lynching in New Orleans / Racial Violence in America — 0.6 mi
• Garden District — 0.6 mi
• Higgins Boat (LCVP) — 0.7 mi