  Civil Rights
Download a full color brochure of the Alabama Civil Rights Museum Trail (PDF 2MB) By Mark A. Newman During the 1950s and 60s, civil rights activists fought for racial justice across the South. Today, many of those battlegrounds have evolved into state-of-the-art museums that explain the stories within the movement. Midway along the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail on U.S. Highway 80 in Hayneville lies the $10 million Lowndes County Interpretive Center. The National Park Service facility commemorates the location where marchers camped after being forced from their homes for attempting to register to vote. The Civil Rights Memorial Center in downtown Montgomery contains exhibits depicting momentous events that occurred in the city and explains how 40 activists died in the South between 1955 and 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. A Wall of Tolerance allows visitors to sign a pledge to promote racial justice. The Rosa Parks Museum, the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where King preached, and the Dexter Parsonage Museum are within a few blocks of the visitors center. In Selma, you can walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where marchers were attacked in 1965, then step inside the National Voting Rights Museum to learn about the movement's "foot soldiers." Birmingham's Civil Rights District includes Kelly Ingram Park, where marches were formed, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four young girls were killed by a racist's bomb. Across the street is the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the nation's finest civil rights museum. It has 58,000 square feet of archives, galleries, community meeting rooms and exhibit spaces. Other important sites include the Tuskegee Human & Civil Rights Multicultural Center and the airfield where the Tuskegee Airmen trained during World War II. For Additional Information: |
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