Dr. Gordon A. Rodgers Jr.1915 – 2007
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His Anniston

The places of his life

Dr. Rodgers spent most of his ninety-two years in Anniston, Alabama — as a boy on Cooper Avenue, a dentist home from the war, an NAACP leader, and, from 1968, the city's first Black councilman. The ten places below span his own memory and the wider civil rights history of the town around him. Each one is marked with how confident we are in the details, and every fact links back to its source.

Two sites are shown for historical context rather than a direct connection to Dr. Rodgers: the 1961 Freedom Riders bus attack at the Greyhound station and the burning site west of town. Several more Anniston civil rights landmarks — including the Trailways station and the library desegregation site — are documented on the city's own Civil Rights Trail.

Map

An interactive map of the places below. Requires JavaScript; everything on it also appears in the list that follows.

Places, in the order they enter his story

Ten places from Dr. Rodgers's life and Anniston's civil rights history, each marked with how confident we are in the details. Confirmed sources are named beneath every entry.

  1. The Seventeenth Street school

    Uncertain

    Childhood, 1920s

    17th Street & Pine Avenue, Anniston, AL (approximate; the building no longer stands)

    Before Cobb High School existed, Anniston's public school for Black children stood at Seventeenth Street and Pine Avenue. It began as a six-grade elementary school, and, in Dr. Rodgers's words, "through the ingenuity of some loving and cooperative Black principals," one grade at a time was added over about ten years, and the school eventually led to Cobb, Anniston's only Black public high school — built at a different site. Dr. Rodgers attended the earlier school through the ninth grade before his mother sent him on to Talladega College's preparatory division, believing the public school offered less than her children's "full potential."

    Sources: Interview by Shaun Simmons for Dr. Suzanne Marshall’s oral history project, April 12, 1995. Courtesy of Jacksonville State University, Houston Cole Library. · Interview recorded April 17, 2002, Frederick Burger Research Collection. Courtesy of the Public Library of Anniston-Calhoun County Digital Collections.

  2. Talladega College

    Verified

    1930s

    Talladega, AL (about 25 miles from Anniston)

    Dr. Rodgers finished high school in Talladega College's preparatory division and graduated from the college itself in June 1937. His mother, Fannie Lewis Rodgers, had earned a normal-school degree there in 1912, and his older sister Frances also attended. He went on to Meharry Medical College's dental school in Nashville, graduating in 1941.

    Sources: Interview by Shaun Simmons for Dr. Suzanne Marshall’s oral history project, April 12, 1995. Courtesy of Jacksonville State University, Houston Cole Library. · Interview recorded April 17, 2002, Frederick Burger Research Collection. Courtesy of the Public Library of Anniston-Calhoun County Digital Collections.

  3. 1600 block of Cooper Avenue

    Probable

    1920s–1950s

    Cooper Avenue near 16th–17th Streets, Anniston, AL 36201

    Dr. Rodgers grew up at 1618 Cooper Avenue, in a neighborhood he described as more mixed than strictly segregated — "there were a lot of white neighborhoods on the west side too." After returning from World War II he lived again "right here in Anniston... in the sixteen hundred block on Cooper," before the family later moved to Claxton Street. Decades afterward his daughter, Dr. Beverly Rodgers, practiced dentistry on Cooper Avenue next to her grandparents' old house.

    Sources: Interview by Shaun Simmons for Dr. Suzanne Marshall’s oral history project, April 12, 1995. Courtesy of Jacksonville State University, Houston Cole Library. · Interview recorded April 17, 2002, Frederick Burger Research Collection. Courtesy of the Public Library of Anniston-Calhoun County Digital Collections. · Family knowledge and records, shared by the Rodgers family. · The Anniston Star, profile of Dr. Beverly Rodgers (undated).

  4. 1001 Claxton Street

    Verified

    Family home, from about 1952

    1001 Claxton Street, Anniston, AL 36201

    The Rodgers family home, confirmed by the family. On his 1995 background sheet Dr. Rodgers wrote that he had lived here since 1952. The 1995 interview was recorded here.

    Sources: Family knowledge and records, shared by the Rodgers family. · Interview by Shaun Simmons for Dr. Suzanne Marshall’s oral history project, April 12, 1995. Courtesy of Jacksonville State University, Houston Cole Library. · Frederick Burger Research Collection, Public Library of Anniston-Calhoun County. Includes interview notes and newspaper clippings.

  5. Greyhound bus station site

    Verified

    May 14, 1961 (context)

    1031 Gurnee Avenue, Anniston, AL 36201

    On Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, a Freedom Rider bus stopped at Anniston's Greyhound terminal on this site, where a mob slashed its tires before police escorted it out of town. It is included here for context, not as a place tied to Dr. Rodgers directly — no source places him at the scene, though he had led the Anniston NAACP branch in the 1950s. The site is now part of the Freedom Riders National Monument.

    Sources: Encyclopedia of Alabama, Alabama Humanities Alliance. · Andrew Dubbins, The Daily Beast.

  6. Freedom Riders bus-burning site

    Verified

    May 14, 1961 (context)

    Old Birmingham Highway (Alabama 202), about 6 miles west of Anniston, near Bynum, AL

    Chased down what was then Old Birmingham Highway, the same bus was firebombed and destroyed here by a mob that tried to hold its doors shut. Like the Greyhound station above, this is included for historical context rather than as a place in Dr. Rodgers's own account — no source ties him to the scene. In his 2002 interview he was asked directly about Anniston's reputation for Klan violence in this period and agreed the city "had a problem," ranking it third in the state behind Birmingham and Selma, without adding independent detail about this event.

    Sources: Encyclopedia of Alabama, Alabama Humanities Alliance. · Andrew Dubbins, The Daily Beast.

  7. West 15th Street & the Blair Hotel

    Probable

    1940s–1960s

    West 15th Street Historic District, Anniston, AL 36201

    Dr. Rodgers remembered it as "Big Fifteen": West 15th Street, the commercial heart of Black Anniston, with "three or four places where you could buy a hamburger," places to eat lunch and dinner, and the Blair Hotel. The City of Anniston's Civil Rights Trail marker states that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held strategy sessions with Dr. Rodgers and Rev. Nimrod Q. Reynolds at the Blair Hotel here, though it gives no specific date. Dr. Rodgers remembered the street fondly in 1995: "Back in the old days, when you'd buy your hamburger on Fifteenth Street, you owned that hamburger place."

    Hear him describe this in his own words →

    Sources: City of Anniston Civil Rights Trail. · Interview by Shaun Simmons for Dr. Suzanne Marshall’s oral history project, April 12, 1995. Courtesy of Jacksonville State University, Houston Cole Library.

  8. Seventeenth Street Baptist Church

    Probable

    1960s

    801 West 17th Street, Anniston, AL 36201

    In the 1995 interview, Shaun Simmons asked about Dr. King's visit to "17th Street" in the early sixties and his marches with Rev. Nimrod Reynolds, Rev. Nettles and other ministers; the recording garbles the church's name at that point. Dr. Rodgers answered that "we were real, real glad to have a big leader, Martin Luther King, come to our town." Seventeenth Street Baptist Church, a stop on the city's Civil Rights Trail, is the most likely match, but this identification is an inference made for this site, not a claim either source states outright.

    Sources: Interview by Shaun Simmons for Dr. Suzanne Marshall’s oral history project, April 12, 1995. Courtesy of Jacksonville State University, Houston Cole Library. · City of Anniston Civil Rights Trail.

  9. Noble Street

    Uncertain

    Segregation era

    Noble Street, Anniston, AL (exact site not identified)

    Downtown, "black people didn't think about sitting down in a restaurant," Dr. Rodgers recalled in 1995. "There were some places where you could go to a window and get you a sandwich made." Later in the same answer he drew the contrast with West 15th Street: "Back in the old days, when you'd buy your hamburger on Fifteenth Street, you owned that hamburger place. But up on Noble Street, you'd go to a window outside a place and buy a hamburger." No specific address survives for the windows he described; this marker sits along the Noble Street corridor generally.

    Hear him describe this in his own words →

    Sources: Interview by Shaun Simmons for Dr. Suzanne Marshall’s oral history project, April 12, 1995. Courtesy of Jacksonville State University, Houston Cole Library.

  10. Anniston City Hall

    Probable

    From 1968, two terms

    1129 Noble Street, Anniston, AL 36201

    Elected in 1968 as the first Black member of the Anniston City Council, Dr. Rodgers served two terms. It is not confirmed whether today's city hall building, at this address, is the same one in which he served.

    Sources: William Thornton, The Birmingham News, December 27, 2007. Via the Burger research file. · A.S. Turner & Sons Funeral Home, obituary of Dr. James Phillips Noble.