Visit the Freedom Rides Museum in Montgomery where Freedom Riders stepped off buses to peacefully confront violent mobs.
A plaque tells Rosa Parks’ history.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice encloses 800 six-foot monuments.
This saying is on the wall in the lobby of the Legacy Museum.
by Martin Luther King Jr. and his family when he lived there. Selma’s redbrick Brown Chapel AME Church with its dual cupola-topped towers and side stained-glass windows dates back to 1866 and was the starting point for the 1965 voting rights marches. Outside is a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. who held rallies at the church and led the historic Selma to Montgomery March. Located on the other side of the Pettus Bridge, the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute showcases marchers’ testimonials and artifacts including voting records and clothing of those beaten. The “Footprints Hall of Fame” has activists’ actual cast footprints. Other exhibits include a jail cell and voting booth, while another highlights women’s suffrage. The museum’s sister institution, the Ancient Africa, Enslavement and Civil War Museum delves into a historical view of slavery in America. Away from the Civil Rights Trail, Birmingham’s other points of interest include Sloss Furnaces, a former industrial site with its tangle of rusted pipes, smokestacks, and tanks that remain intact today after first producing pig iron in 1882. A National Historic Landmark, Sloss Furnaces is the country’s only preserved
blast furnace that’s now a museum. Birmingham’s Negro Southern League Museum has the largest collection of original baseball league artifacts in the country, including players’ uniforms, trophies, and the impressive display of 1500 original signed baseballs. And at the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum, some of the museum’s 1600 motorcycle collection stack up several levels high within the central atrium’s grid-like display. Opposite the State Capitol in Montgomery, the two-story First White House of the Confederacy features an ornate roof trim in Italianate architectural design. Jefferson Davis and his family lived in the home in 1861 for less than four months, leaving when the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond. The house contains some original family furniture and Civil War relics. Fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and short stories might want to visit the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in what is the actual Montgomery house where the couple lived in 1931-1932. Zelda Sayre grew up in Montgomery, and the museum’s former living areas include original family furnishings, books, and other belongings. While in the home they wrote parts of their novels, respectively— Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz and F. Scott’s Tender is the
HISTORIC CIVIL RIGHTS TRAIL
COAST TO COAST FALL MAGAZINE 2020
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