The Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement - Montgomery, Alabama

Visited Jan. 7-12, 2021

By Marty

Note:  This is an "after the fact" post as we work our way backwards to catch you up on our previous destinations.

We visited Montgomery for six days. Our time out and about was spent exploring locations, monuments, and museums related to the American civil rights movement. Since arriving in the south we have visited a number of sites that played a role in the civil rights movement as well as sites that speak to our nation's enslavement legacy. We have found these sites to be both enlightening and sobering.

Montgomery has a number of significant civil rights related locations to experience.

We found it interesting that the segregation of the Montgomery city bus system ended in December, 1956, thanks to Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, yet five years passed until the segregation of interstate buses ended, in fall of 1961, thanks to the Freedom Rider movement.

There is a Rosa Parks Museum but it has limited hours and was closed the day we were there.

The Freedom Rides museum was fascinating, taking us on a detailed walk through the Freedom Riders movement to end segregation on interstate buses.  It is located in the former Greyhound bus station where, in 1961, civil rights activists were beaten by a crowd of white protesters when their bus arrived in Montgomery. Because of previous violence against other Freedom Riders and national publicity involving the Freedom Rider movement, an escort of Alabama State Troopers had been assigned to escort the bus through Alabama.  When the bus entered the Montgomery city limits the Troopers disappeared....

The site of "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, Alabama where, on March 7, 1961, 600 people began a march to gain voting rights for African Americans. Selma is the seat of Dallas County where, in 1961, only 156 of the county's 15,000 voting-age African Americans were registered to vote in 1961.

When the marchers crossed the bridge they were met by a "sea of blue" according to protest leader and future US Congressman John Lewis. The marchers were charged, beaten, and tear gassed by Troopers on horse and on foot, ending the march for that day.

There is so much more to know about this event, but I'll just tell you that two weeks later the march resumed, this time with 4,000 marchers. The march took four days to cover the 54 miles to  Montgomery, growing in number to 25,000 marchers upon arrival at the State Capitol steps.

Alabama State Capitol. Notice the crosswalk in the foreground

Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, one block from the State Capitol. Martin Luther King Jr. served as senior pastor from 1954 until 1960.

A portion of the Civil Rights Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, who also designed Washington's Vietnam Memorial.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

 

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is located a few blocks from downtown. It has also been referred to as the Lynching Memorial.

The memorial acknowledges the victims of racial terror lynchings. More than 4,400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.

The companion sight to the Memorial is the Legacy Museum located downtown. The museum immerses "visitors in the sights and sounds of the domestic slave trade, racial terrorism, the Jim Crow South, and the worlds largest prison system." We don't have any photos from the Legacy Museum but it was quite well done and impactful. Both the Museum and the Memorial opened in 2018.

For Janell and me, the Memorial was exceptionally profound, more so than anything we have visited or experienced on our trip. We liken it to the impact that we felt upon visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC many years ago.

 If you want to know more about the Memorial you can read this article:

 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/lynching-memorial-alabama.html

While in Charleston we visited the Old Slave Mart Museum. We'll tell you more about that museum when we work back to a Charleston post. In Charleston we learned something rather astounding to us. In the 350 years preceding the end of slavery in the US there were 12.5 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic. Of that number 10.7 million survived the journey. Of those 10.7 million enslaved Africans "only" 388,000 were shipped to North America. The remaining 10.4 million were shipped to the Caribbean and South America. We had no idea of the magnitude of the slave trade or the imbalance as to destination.

The memorial is a hollow square where you walk through and around, initially, 800 suspended steel columns, each one representing a county in the United States where one or more documenting lynchings has occurred. Each column lists the names and dates for each lynching. Some list dates only as the victim is "unknown". 

As you walk through the memorial the floor becomes a ramp. You descend but the columns do not.

By the end the columns are suspended above you, as though you are looking up at lynching victims.

 

When you leave the main memorial you pass through Monument Park. Here you find a duplicate column, more like a coffin really, for each of the ones that exist inside. The idea is that each county where lynchings occurred will one day acknowledge this part of their heritage and request to be given their monument to create their own local memorial. To that end, one day there would be no monuments left in Monument Park.

Monument Park