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The Footsoldiers Park administrative suites and a political organization known as The Institute for Common Power embarked on a new journey together in Downtown Selma.

Both businesses including city officials and community members gathered around the entrance of The Selma Times-Journal Building, marking the area as their brand-new home.

While the Footsoldiers Park aligns with the historical piece of Selma, Common Power takes the education learned in the Black Belt and transforms the power behind the education into civic action. 

Both businesses now reside on the main floor of the STJ building. Even though each organization’s mission is quite different, Kimberly Smitherman, founding partner and chief executive officer of Footsoldiers Park, mentions the whole end goal of both businesses is quite the same. 

“This is not just a ribbon cutting,” Smitherman said. “This is a combination of dedication, passion and collaboration that has taken place for us to be able to preserve this historic building.”

In 2022, Seattle natives Steve Romein and Ty Cramer of Heyday Holdings, LLC, bought the STJ building in hopes to restore it and bring more life to it. 

Once they heard the story of Jo Ann Bland, the Footsoldiers Park founder and chief strategy officer, and that she was in search of a building downtown, they could not pass on the opportunity to help.  

“From the start, it was what does Selma need?” said Romein. “We asked Ms. Jo Ann what she needed, and she said ‘I need a room that will hold at least three buses full of fifty people each.’” 

Romein could only offer a two-bus auditorium, but he kept Bland’s vision in mind to have her own store and soon develop a park and a community center that will sit in the center of the George Washington Carver homes (GWC) community, dedicated to the Footsoldiers.

“I wanted a building that could open in George Washington Carver homes that was so nice that everybody would want to come there,” Bland said. “Because we rarely put anything nice in the hood. Things are thrown up there and left, and the Footsoldiers Park will not be like that. It means too much to me and too much to the footsoldiers.”

Bland said the Footsoldiers Park is in the first phase of the process, where the building designs are underway. It will feature a green space, a memorial, a playground and a hub created by the community, for the community.