The Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice monuments.
unveiled last December. It pays tribute to where she stepped onto a bus on December 1, 1955, and refused to give up her seat for white passengers. After her arrest and trial, Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott until the Supreme Court desegregated public transportation a year later. “Court Square is where two pivotal moments in American history happened across the street from each other,” explains Collier Neeley, Executive Director of the Landmark Foundation of Montgomery. “Not only the start of the Civil Rights Movement, but also that’s the corner where the order was given to fire on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War,” he adds, referring to where a telegram was sent from a still existing building off the square. Just a block away from the bus stop, the Rosa Parks Museum within Troy University showcases Parks’ actual fingerprint arrest record, court documents and police reports, and a 1950s-era city bus similar to the one Parks was riding in on that historic day. Visitors can sit on the bus and also view a restored 1955 station wagon, one of 19 such vehicles known as a “rolling church” used to transport protestors during the Bus Boycott. Opened in 2018, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum: From
Enslavement to Mass Incarceration was built on the grounds where a warehouse once imprisoned slaves. Exhibits trace the history of lynching, segregation, and racism with rare first-person accounts during the slave trade. On a nearby six-acre site and also opened in 2018, the outdoor National Memorial for Peace and Justice encloses 800 six-foot monuments under a slab- like open roof to symbolize the victims of lynching and racial terror. “It begins the conversation about racial terror and an unequal justice system in the U.S.,” says Neeley. “As you walk through the memorial with its steel monuments, you walk downward and they rise above you, creating a surreal effect that drives home the injustice that existed and how people were victimized and terrorized by not just individuals, but by a system that wanted to maintain oppression.” Other Montgomery civil rights points of interest include the Freedom Rides Museum in a former Greyhound station. It’s here that young Freedom Riders stepped off buses to peacefully confront often violent mobs to help end segregation in public transportation. The Dexter Parsonage Museum was the actual home to pastors of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church from 1920-1992, and has some of the actual furniture used
HISTORIC CIVIL RIGHTS TRAIL
COAST TO COAST FALL MAGAZINE 2020
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