2019 Civil Rights Trail Travel Guide

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TRAIL 2 0 1 9 T R AV E L G U I D E

FOLLOW THE JOURNEY.

DISCOVER THE TRAIL.

Alabama offers a transformative journey, connecting our past and present through the settings that shaped our nation’s civil rights story. From the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to bombing sites in Birmingham, to the State Capitol, discover the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. Learn from the leaders of our past and build on their hopes for a better future.

Start planning a powerful travel experience in heritage-rich Alabama. Give your group the opportunity to grow in empathy and understanding as you explore museums, monuments and historic sites. Visit Alabama and walk in the footsteps of those who changed the world.

To plan your group tour, contact Rosemary Judkins. rosemary.judkins@tourism.alabama.gov 334-242-4493

Wanda Howard Battle, Tour Director Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL

CONTENTS 6

A Civil Rights Timeline

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Civil Rights Road Trips T H E C I V I L R I G H T S M OV E M E N T T O O K S H A P E I N THESE NEIGHBORHOOD CHURCHES.

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F O L L OW T H E S E I T I N E R A R I E S T O D I S C OV E R HISTORIC SITES THROUGHOUT THE SOUTH.

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ON THE COVER:

3500 PIEDMONT RD. NE, STE. 210 ATLANTA, GA 30305 404-231-1790 WWW.TRAVELSOUTHUSA.COM

“Martin Luther King Jr.” by Alabama artist Carole Foret. See more at caroleforet.com.

PUBLISHED BY

NICHE TRAVEL PUBLISHERS 301 EAST HIGH STREET LEXINGTON, KY 40507 888-253-0455 WWW.GROUPTRAVELLEADER.COM

A C i v i l Wa r b at t l e g r o u n d.

N o w a p e a c e f u l r e t r e at.

Stroll Harpers Ferry and hear the echoes of a town with a fascinating living history. This quaint retreat in eastern West Virginia is an official destination along the Civil Rights Trail. Feel free to explore every part of its small-town charm.

WVtourism.com

Harpers Ferry

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WA L KO U T AT RO B E R T R U S SA M OTO N HIGH SCHOOL FA R M V I LLE , V I RGI N I A

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M A R TI N L U T H E R K I N G J R . L E A D S S O U T H E R N C H R I S TI A N L E A D E R S H I P CONFERENCE MON TG OM ERY, A LA BA M A C IV I L R I G H T S AC T O F 1 957 S I G N E D I N TO L AW BY PR E S I D E N T DW I G H T E I S E N H OW E R

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Retrace the Steps that Started a Movement Find inspiration at civil rights museums and monuments across Georgia, getting an up-close look at the lasting impact of a movement. Experience the unfiltered story at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, a global beacon of hope and progress. The draw isn’t just the lessons of looking back—but what your group will take away moving forward.

ExploreGeorgia.org/groups Photo credit: @brittjane_c

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U.S. Civil Rights Trail gains national acclaim

By Human Pictures, courtesy EJI

BY BR I A N JEW ELL

AN EXHIBIT AT THE NEW NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE FEATURES SOIL GATHERED FROM 300 SEPARATE LYNCHING SITES.

or more than 50 years, Americans have learned about the civil rights movement in textbooks and history classes. But thanks to the United States Civil Rights Trail, travelers are rediscovering the historic sites and heroic figures in new and personal ways.

Launched in January 2018, the Civil Rights Trail is a collection of churches, courthouses, schools, museums and other landmarks where activists challenged racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. The trail encompasses more than 100 sites stretching from Kansas to Louisiana, Virginia and Georgia.

Developing the trail was a years-long project spearheaded by tourism leaders in Southern states who saw an opportunity to link and publicize these sites to travelers in the United States and abroad.

Now, a little over a year after the official launch, organizers are realizing how much of an impact their work has made.

“All of us involved in this endeavor have been extremely pleased and excited with the media coverage that has been generated,” said

Lee Sentell, director of the Alabama Tourism Department and one of the visionaries of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. “The extensive awareness that the media attention has generated has made this almost a household name in such a short period of time.

“The New York Times did three full pages in color several months ago that featured lesserknown civil rights sites. On the very same day, the Washington Post ran a full-page story on the museum in Farmville, Virginia, where Barbara Jones, a 16-year-old girl, convinced her schoolmates to strike in 1951. It was probably the earliest organized effort to end segregation in schools.

“The media coverage has exceeded our expectations. Our analysis of the circulation of the announcement last year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day was well over $3 million in public relations value. We spent zero dollars on the launch.”

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1964 Civil Rights March on Frankfort, KY 1964 Civil Rights March on Frankfort, KY

Muhammad Muhammad Ali Ali wasn’t wasn’t the the only only fighter fighter from from Kentucky.

Kentucky.

Kentucky’s African American history is filled with example after example of unbridled Kentucky’s African American history is filled with example after example of unbridled courage – from the 10,000 African American Civil War soldiers who learned how to courage – from the 10,000 African American Civil War soldiers who learned how to fight for their freedom at Camp Nelson to the countless protestors who held hunger fight for their freedom at Camp Nelson to the countless protestors who held hunger strikes and marches across the state in the 1960s to demand equal rights. strikes and marches across the state in the 1960s to demand equal rights.

Now, you can take a remarkable journey that lets you explore those moments Now, you can take a remarkable journey that lets you explore those moments and trace the steps of the men and women who made our commonwealth and trace the steps of the men and women who made our commonwealth great. On the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, explore the birthplace of visionary Whitney great. On the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, explore the birthplace of visionary Whitney M. Young Jr. in Simpsonville. Imagine what it was like to be a freedom fighter on M. Young Jr. in Simpsonville. Imagine what it was like to be a freedom fighter on Louisville’s Downtown Civil Rights Trail. And experience Berea College’s hallowed Louisville’s Downtown Civil Rights Trail. And experience Berea College’s hallowed Lincoln Hall where students stood up for their rights with a 20-hour sit-in.

Lincoln Hall where students stood up for their rights with a 20-hour sit-in.

Get inspired at KYCivilrights.com.

Get inspired at KYCivilrights.com.

A Growing Membership

The Civil Rights Trail is the most comprehensive collection of significant civil rights sites ever compiled. Visitors following the trail through the South will encounter places where some of the most monumental moments in the civil rights movement took place.

In Alabama, they will see Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park, the site of numerous marches and demonstrations. Also included is the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where violence erupted in a march that came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

In Arkansas, the trail includes Little Rock’s Central High School, the site of a tense integration standoff in 1957. And several sites related to Martin Luther King Jr. are on the trail as well, including his first church in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assassinated.

The trail also features lesser-known sites and museums that tell stories from the civil rights movement. These include the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama; the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta; the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Since the trail debuted in 2018, numerous other sites and museums have joined in the effort.

“We just announced five new sites in Florida where civil rights events occurred during the ’50s and ’60s,” Sentell said.

“And we also added the Equal Justice Initiatives Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. So that’s six new sites overall.”

Outreach and Impact

After the trail launched, Sentell and others began promoting it at major events such as the World Travel Mart in London and the New York Times Travel Show. There they were able to talk face to face with travelers and see the impact the project was making on a personal level.

“One of the most memorable things for me was attending the New York Times Travel show in Manhattan the week after launch last year,” Sentell said. “An elderly African-American woman came up to our booth and said, ‘I grew up in South Carolina and left there as a young adult, and I haven’t been back.

Travelers planning a trip on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail can find all the latest news about civil rights sites and events at:

WWW.CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL.COM

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A CIVIL RIGHTS DEMONSTRATION IN ST. AUGUSTINE’S LINCOLNVILLE HISTORIC DISTRICT Courtesy Lincolnville Museum

I never thought I would live to see something like this.’ That made it personal. It’s one thing to bring more groups to museums. But for a person on the street to have an emotional reaction like that was memorable.”

In addition to reaching individual travelers, organizers see the Civil Rights Trail making headway in the group travel market, where influential tour companies and travel organizations are able to bring people to significant civil rights sites by the busload.

“In the past, tour operators were aware of a museum here and a church there, but not many companies were aware that there are over 130 sites, primarily in the Deep South, worth linking together,” Sentell said.

“A good example of this is a nonprofit organization called the Educational Travel Consortium,” he said. “Each year, they go to some exotic international destinations they see as the next great place for well-traveled people to visit. This year, 300 of their members are coming to Montgomery, Alabama, and spending four days visiting civil rights sites, also [some] in Birmingham and Selma. They’re a very prestigious group travel organization, so we think other similar groups are going to follow their lead.”

Looking Ahead

Now that the trail has successfully launched and generated significant awareness and interest among the traveling public, organizers are beginning to shift their focus from growing the membership to establishing a long-term promotional strategy.

“Travel South USA, which is the offices of the Southeastern state tourism departments, has created a marketing alliance, and that group is generating funds to maintain the website and do marketing aimed at international tour operators,” Sentell said.

Another element of the promotional plan is an effort Sentell and others have undertaken to have key places on the Civil Rights Trail designated as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. This designation would bring invaluable attention to these civil rights landmarks and the trail in general.

“We are hopeful that our nomination will be considered by the World Heritage Conference in 2021,” Sentell said.

EVERY SECOND SATURDAY EACH MONTH, the Albany Civil Rights Institute Freedom Singers narrate Albany Movement stories with dynamic testimony and emotionally-charged performances.

V IS I T T H E C I TY W H E R E VOIC E S

ELEVATED A MOVEMENT. During the Albany Movement, thousands of citizens attracted nationwide attention in the first mass movement in the modern civil rights era with the goal of desegregation of an entire community. When you visit the Albany Civil Rights Movement Museum, you’ll hear the stories, feel the songs and see the people who helped change the course of history. And gave momentum to a movement.

Learn more about why Albany, GA is an important stop on the Civil Rights Trail by visiting AlbanyGACivilRights.com.

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THE SITE OF THE INFAMOUS “BLOODY SUNDAY” MARCH, THE EDMUND PETTUS BRIDGE IS NOW A CIVIL RIGHTS LANDMARK IN SELMA.

Discover the trail using these itineraries

T

BY R ACHEL C A RTER

he fight for civil rights was a nationwide movement, but the South was the hotbed where activists protested and marched; held sit-ins and swim-ins; and organized boycotts, strikes and voter-registration drives.

The United States Civil Rights Trail demonstrates the depth and breadth of the movement with over 100 sites in 15 states, plus the District of Columbia. To discover some of these amazing places, plan a regional road trip that includes stops at numerous sites on the Civil Rights Trail and provides a regional take on the important people and places of the civil rights movement.

Here are five road trip itineraries to follow as you explore the Civil Rights Trail.

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Courtesy USCRT

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MISSISSIPPI RIVER AREA: MEMPHIS TO NEW ORLEANS Beginning in Memphis, Tennessee, this itinerary roughly follows the Mississippi River south, with a detour to Little Rock, Arkansas, and continues all the way to New Orleans. Along the way, travelers will find important sites associated with Martin Luther King Jr. and several notable museums and historic places.

NATIONAL CIV I L R I G HTS

MUSEUM

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE Memphis is hallowed ground on the Civil Rights Trail. The city is where King delivered his final and some say prophetic speech at the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ the night before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. The recently renovated National Civil Rights Museum at Courtesy Memphis CVB the Lorraine Motel features state-of-the-art, interactive exhibits that showcase iconic artifacts, such as a sit-in counter and a Freedom Rider bus. The “I Am a Man” exhibit tells how King came to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. The two rooms where governor to keep them out. By the end of the month, those nine students King would usually stay have been preserved as were again met by National Guard troops, this time ordered by President they were on April 4, 1968, and guests can see Eisenhower to escort them in. into the rooms and through to the balcony where The Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site is an active King was assassinated. school, so access to the building is limited; but site tours include the visitor center, a commemorative garden and a historically preserved Mobil gas station, and if possible, the school’s foyer, auditorium and cafeteria. Groups LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS can also visit the Little Rock Nine Memorial at the state Capitol.

When the Little Rock Nine tried to enter the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957, they were met by a mob of angry segregationists, crowds of press and National Guard troops ordered by the Arkansas

MISSISSIPPI CIVIL RIGHTS

MUSEUM

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opened in December 2017 and has quickly become a must-visit site on the Civil Rights Trail. Eight galleries focus on the years 1945 to 1976 when Mississippi was on the front lines of the civil rights movement. Galleries lead visitors from the Mississippi slaves’ struggle for freedom through Reconstruction and from World War II through the Jim Crow era and the fight for equal rights. The final gallery asks guests to think about changes and contributions they can make in their own communities.

In the central rotunda, the soaring sculpture “This Little Light of Mine” changes color above visitors’ heads as freedom songs play, and throughout the museum, guests will find small theaters playing films that tie into each exhibit.

NEW ORLEANS

Courtesy Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

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Ruby Bridges was only 6 years old in 1960 when she became the first African-American student to attend the previously all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Four federal marshals escorted Ruby and her mother to the school every day that year past angry crowds lobbing

vicious slurs. Groups can visit the school, where a statue of Ruby stands in the courtyard, and arrange to tour the building, which includes the restored classroom 2306.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is still an active courtroom, but groups can also arrange tours of the National Historic Landmark where the judges are known as the Fifth Circuit Four for handing down decisions that were crucial in integrating schools and advancing civil rights for African-Americans.

NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM

ALABAMA AND GEORGIA: SELMA TO ALBANY

Courtesy RosaMemphis Parks Museum Courtesy CVB

Many of the most significant events of the civil rights movement took place in the Deep South states of Alabama and Georgia. This itinerary begins in Selma, Alabama, and circles to Birmingham, Alabama; Atlanta; and Albany, Georgia, to showcase some monumental civil rights sites.

SELMA, ALABAMA

“There is no noise as powerful as the sound of the marching feet of a determined people.”

— M A RTIN LU THER K ING JR .

Selma, Alabama, was ground zero during the fight for African-Americans’ voting rights. On March 7, 1965, activists began a 54-mile march from Selma to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. But as hundreds of nonviolent demonstrators attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and sheriffs’ deputies knocked them down, gassed them and beat them.

The violent attack, known as Bloody Sunday, bolstered support for the campaign, and the subsequent marches helped pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Today, people flock to Selma to walk across the bridge. Visitors can learn more about the fight for voting rights at the free Selma Interpretive Center at the foot of the bridge and at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute across the bridge.

LITTLE ROCK

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Courtesy USCRT

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Courtesy International Civil Rights Center

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BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA A trifecta of civil rights sites sits at one intersection in Birmingham: the 16th Street Baptist Church, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Kelly Ingram Park, which served as a staging ground for the community’s large-scale demonstrations, marches and rallies.

On September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the church building killing four young girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Their faces are memorialized in the bronze statue “Four Spirits” across from the church at the edge of the park. Groups can tour the 1911 church and explore exhibits at the institute. A mobile phone audio tour of the park takes visitors through Birmingham’s role in the civil rights movement and provides the historical significance of each of the park’s sculptures.

“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would also be free.”

— ROSA PA R KS

BIRMINGHAM CIVIL RIGHTS

INSTITUTE

Courtesy Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

Walk Together

Explore the halls of the elementary school that symbolizes the tipping point to abolish segregation. There’s no place like Kansas to celebrate change.

800.2.KANSAS · TravelKS.com/CivilRights

18 of CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL.COM Brown v. Board Education National Historic Site

#NoPlaceLikeKS

BRUCE BOYNTON: BOYNTON V. VIRGINIA

B

ruce Boynton vividly remembers what he ordered in 1958 in the whites-only restaurant of the Trailways bus station in Richmond, Virginia: It was a cheeseburger and tea with cream.

“I knew that it was against the law,” said Boynton, a retired attorney originally from Selma, Alabama, who on that pivotal day was traveling home by bus on holiday break from law classes at Howard University in Washington. “The waitress took my order and left. I assumed I was going to be served, since I was in the upper part of the South.”

Instead, the manager came out, called him a racial slur and told him to leave.

“That galvanized me into refusing,” said Boynton, who was arrested for trespassing.

At the time, the idea of using civil disobedience to fight racial segregation was still relatively novel, and the lower Virginia courts ruled against Boynton’s right to remain on the premises.

But future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall took up the case and argued on Boynton’s behalf in the federal courts, which led to a 1960 Supreme Court decision that overturned Boynton’s conviction on the grounds that segregation in public transportation and its services, including food service, violated the Interstate Commerce Act. The decision had profound ramifications for the civil rights movement. “It produced the Freedom Riders,” Boynton said.

“It inspired the lunch counter sit-ins, and . . . changed the way that black people fought for their civil rights.”

FOR MORE CIVIL RIGHTS STORIES, VISIT VIMEO.COM/CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL

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ATLANTA King was born in Atlanta, and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park includes his childhood home, where he lived until he was 12, as well as the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he was ordained at 19 and served as co-pastor with his father until his death in 1968. Groups can explore King’s boyhood home, the visitor center and the rose garden.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change recently added audio of King’s voice throughout the campus and video monitors in Freedom Hall; the reflecting pool where King and his wife are entombed in a white crypt was renovated as well.

The Center for Civil and Human Rights immerses visitors in the civil rights era through interactive, sensory exhibits.

ALBANY, GEORGIA

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SOCIAL CHANGE

THE CAROLINAS: ST. HELENA ISLAND TO RALEIGH While major events in the fight for civil rights were taking place in Alabama and Georgia, residents of North and South Carolina were demonstrating and marching for their rights as well. This itinerary starts in St. Helena Island, South Carolina, and proceeds north to the state capitol in Columbia; it then crosses into North Carolina with stops in Greensboro and Raleigh.

ST. HELENA ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA

Courtesy Experience Columbia SC

STATE HOUSE

CENTER FOR NONVIOLENT

By James Duckworth, courtesy ACVB

The Albany Movement began at Shiloh Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. Student activists and a coalition of black-improvement associations launched the desegregation campaign in November 1961 to challenge all forms of racial segregation and discrimination in the city. The movement led to a series of protests and demonstrations, and local leaders eventually turned to King to bring national attention to their efforts.

Across the street from Shiloh Baptist, the Old Mount Zion Church is another site where mass meetings were held. The restored 1906 church is now part of the Albany Civil Rights Institute, where museum exhibits include oral histories, documents and photographs from the era. Groups can also learn about the music of the civil rights movement and can even hear the Freedom Singers perform every second Saturday of the month.

SOUTH CAROLINA

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

The Penn Center on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island is the site of the Penn School, the first school in the South for freed slaves, which was founded in 1862, three years before the Civil War ended. Teachers from Pennsylvania came to the island as part of the Port Royal Experiment to educate black people.

The 50-acre campus is home to 19 buildings. Visitors can step inside the Brick Baptist Church, the largest building on campus, where slaves-turnedstudents learned reading, writing and arithmetic. Other historic buildings include dormitories, the dining hall and the community house. Groups can explore the York W. Bailey Museum and will also find a farmers market housed in an old barn and a new aquaponic greenhouse where the center is raising fish and growing herbs.

IT WAS A NATIONAL MOVEMENT. NOW IT’S A NATIONAL MONUMENT. The Civil Rights Movement that helped galvanize the nation is now being recognized on a national level. But the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail does more than just acknowledge where we’ve been. It offers visitors a chance to celebrate where we’re going. Book your next tour in a place rich with history. Book your next tour in Birmingham.

inbirmingham.com/GTL� | 800 - 458 - 8085

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA Downtown Columbia was the site of many important moments in the civil rights movement. On March 2, 1961, NAACP leaders and more than 200 students from local black colleges and segregated high schools marched from the Zion Baptist Church to the South Carolina State House. On the statehouse grounds, protestors sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and 187 of them were arrested. Free guided and self-guided tours of the statehouse are available Monday through Friday.

Groups can also schedule a visit to the small, white cottage that was home to Modjeska Monteith, an important leader of the civil rights movement in South Carolina. Her cottage was used to house civil rights leaders and host meetings.

GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA The International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, opened in 2010 in the F.W. Woolworth building, where four students had begun sit-in protests at the lunch counter 50 years earlier. The former department store was slated for demolition in the early 1990s, but local leaders saved the property and turned it into a museum that included the original lunch counter where the sit-ins took place from February 1 to July 25, 1960. The museum’s 16 galleries focus on the Greensboro demonstrations then expand to explore the civil rights movement more broadly.

On the North Carolina A&T State University campus, groups can also visit the February One Monument, which honors the four A&T students who planned and carried out the first sit-in at Woolworth’s.

SOUTH CAROLINA

STATE HOUSE

Courtesy Experience Columbia SC

RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA At historically black colleges like Shaw University and St. Augustine’s University, Raleigh’s black students and activists played an important role in the civil rights movement through protests and sit-ins at local stores.

Shaw alumna Ella Baker founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at her alma mater in 1960. When Estey Hall was built on the Shaw campus in 1874, it was the first building constructed in the U.S. for the higher education of black women; today, it is Shaw University’s oldest surviving building.

Also in Raleigh, the features a life-size sculpture of King and a granite water monument to the city’s civil rights leaders.

MID-ATLANTIC: RICHMOND TO WILMINGTON Cities in the upper South and Mid-Atlantic had important roles to play in the civil rights movement. This itinerary begins in Richmond, Virginia, and travels north to Washington, D.C.; west to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia; and then, finally, east to the Atlantic coast in Wilmington, Delaware.

Courtesy Visit Raleigh

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

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On April 23, 1951, Barbara Rose Johns led a student body walkout to protest overcrowding and inferior conditions at Robert Russa Moton High School, Prince Edward County’s all-black high school. When the school opened in 1939 in Farmville, Virginia, it was built to house 180 students.

By the late 1940s, enrollment had grown to more than 450 students, many of whom were being taught in leaking tar-paper shacks with no insulation.

Shine Light on the Power of Courage.

Explore the movement that changed the nation — and the people behind it.

Stand with Mississippians like Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer and many others through interactive experiences that bring their stories to life.

222 North Street, Jackson mscivilrightsmuseum.com

The NAACP lawsuit against the county, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, later became one of five cases folded into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that made segregation unlawful. Johns and her fellow students are honored in the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial at the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond.

A HISTORIC PRESENTATION AT HARPER’S FERRY NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK

WASHINGTON The nation’s capital is home to several iconic sites that symbolize the struggle of the civil rights movement. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom culminated at the Lincoln Memorial, where King gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Nearby, also on the National Mall, visitors will see the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.

Groups can also visit the U.S. Supreme Court, where docents lead lectures and visitors can explore exhibits and videos about the court and its important cases, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September 2016, and inside, the Smithsonian Institution museum features nearly 37,000 artifacts, documents and photos that explore AfricaAmerican life, history and culture.

HARPERS FERRY

NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK

Photos courtesy NPS

HARPERS FERRY, WEST VIRGINIA

Harpers Ferry is a historic town turned national park in West Virginia.

In Lower Town, historic buildings line Shenandoah, High and Potomac streets and house museums and exhibits along with the information center and a bookshop.

Storer College was founded in Harpers Ferry in 1865, and the historically black college trained black schoolteachers to meet the influx of freedmen seeking education. Ironically, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation in 1954 led to Storer College’s closing in 1955. State officials decided to end the college’s yearly stipend because the board preferred to support state-sponsored schools that had more students. Many of the former campus buildings are still within the national park today, including Anthony Hall, where the Niagara Movement met in 1906.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

M EMORIAL

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE

Courtesy USCRT

Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware, is one of the schools associated with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

Parents of black students living in Claymont, Delaware, sued to enroll their children in the local all-white high school. Before the Brown ruling, black students were bused to Howard High School, which was nine miles away in an “undesirable” part of Wilmington. The school became a designated National Historic Landmark in 2005 and was renovated in 2014 to become Howard High School of Technology but is not open for public tours.

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HISTORY NATURALLY MADE

THE LITTLE ROCK NINE MONUMENT AT THE ARKANSAS STATE CAPITOL COMMEMORATES THE STUDENTS WHO PAVED THE WAY FOR INTEGRATION. MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER IN LITTLE ROCK SERVES TO EDUCATE VISITORS ON AFRICAN-AMERICAN CULTURE. VISIT THE LITTLE ROCK CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE AND LEARN MORE AT CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL.COM.

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AN EXHIBIT AT THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE PAYS TRIBUTE TO THOUSANDS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LYNCHING VICTIMS.

New sites shine for 2019

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BY R ACHEL C A RTER

he United States Civil Rights Trail launched in 2018 with over 100 sites: places where activists sought equal access to public education, public transportation and voting rights.

But the trail has grown, adding six new sites where civil rights history was made or where it is memorialized.

These museums, memorials and historic destinations are recent additions to the U.S. Civil Rights Trail.

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By Human Pictures, courtesy EJI

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Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration National Memorial for Peace and Justice MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA

NATIONAL MEMORIAL

FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

In April 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Alabama.

The 11,000-square-foot museum sits on a site where enslaved people were once warehoused and uses technology to illustrate the enslavement of African-Americans, the terror of racial lynchings and the legacy of racial segregation in America.

One exhibits features over 300 jars of soil collected from various lynching sites. In another area, guests can step into prison visitor booths,

By Human Pictures, courtesy EJI pick up the phone and listen to the stories of people who are incarcerated.

“We’re making this argument that slavery is connected to the racial injustice issues, especially in the current criminal justice system,” said Kiara Boone, EJI’s deputy director of community education.

A water exhibit is dedicated to the undocumented victims of racial The memorial provides “that opportunity terrorism, and a glass case in the center contains soil from over a dozen to be confronted with this history in a truthful lynching sites. and explicit way,” she said.

EJI suggests that people visit the museum first and then the memoA forest of 800 six-foot-tall steel monoliths rial.

Both are designed to be self-guided experiences. Groups can also are engraved with the names of 4,400 docuattend presentations about EJI and its legal work at the Peace and Justice mented lynching victims. As guests continue Memorial Center, across the street, where EJI hopes to soon have a through the memorial, the plates begin to rise space for groups to rent. until “they’re completely above your head,” MUSEUMANDMEMORIAL.EJI.ORG Boone said.

Visitors then see the “reasons” people were lynched: passing a note to a white woman, saying no to a police officer, trying to vote, Bay County Courthouse owning land.

PANAMA CITY, FLORIDA

BAY COUNTY COURTHOUSE

Courtesy Destination Panama City

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When Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with burglarizing the Bay Harbor Pool Room in 1961, he couldn’t afford an attorney. And when he appeared in the Bay County Courthouse in Panama City, Florida, the judge refused to appoint one for Gideon, forcing him to mount his own defense at trial. When the jury convicted Gideon, the court sentenced him to five years in the state prison.

From his prison cell, Gideon appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, using the prison library for reference and writing on prison stationary.

The Supreme Court overturned his conviction in the now-famous Gideon v. Wainwright case, unanimously ruling that states are required under the Sixth Amendment to provide an attorney to defendants in criminal cases who cannot afford to hire their own.

Two years after his initial trial, Gideon was retried at the same courthouse and acquitted.

A historic marker about the Gideon case sits outside the 1915 yellowbrick courthouse in downtown.

The building is still a functioning county court, so it’s open to the public; but visitors have to go through a security checkpoint. It’s also

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or Leslie Burl McLemore, the fight for equal rights is embedded in the foundation of American democracy itself.

“Because of the Declaration of Independence, we have a framework in America that says ‘All men are created equal,’ that we all ought to be first-class citizens,” said McLemore, who, in the early 1960s, served as president of the NAACP chapter at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He also served as regional coordinator for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s efforts to register voters throughout Mississippi as part of the 1963 Freedom Vote campaign.

Before these efforts, “no one had been going door to door trying to get black folks to register,” said McLemore, a professor emeritus of political science at Jackson State University.

For McLemore, voting rights represented just one step toward true democratic representation. In 1964, in response to the segregationist stance of the mainline Mississippi Democratic Party, McLemore and others with the Council of Federated Organizations founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a new racially integrated party.

Despite their efforts, the MFDP was not allowed to be seated at the 1964 National Democratic Convention. Instead, the party was offered two nonvoting seats alongside the mainline Mississippi delegates.

“I thought that . . . we had the legal and moral argument. I felt strongly that we should have been seated,” McLemore said. “But we were doing something important. We were changing Mississippi. We were changing the world.”

S A R A S O TA ’ S

NEWTOWN COMMUNITY I S T H E L AT E S T L A N D M A R K O N THE U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS TRAIL.

LESLIE BURL MCLEMORE: FIGHTING FOR DEMOCRACY

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The Newtown African American Heritage Trail is now the southernmost site on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail.

It highlights the history of Sarasota’s African-American community, Newtown.

Tours by Newtown Alive! will focus on the 1950s and 1960s efforts of Newtown residents to desegregate Sarasota’s beaches. These efforts included car caravans from the Newtown community to Lido Beach to hold ‘wade-ins’ in attempt to force beach integration.

For more information and to book a tour, visit www.newtownalive.org/book-trolley-tour/.

VisitSarasota.com 844-4-MY-SARASOTA

LONGBOAT KEY | ST. ARMANDS | LIDO KEY SIESTA KEY | CASEY KEY | VENICE MANASOTA KEY | ENGLEWOOD | NORTH PORT

one of 14 sites on the historic downtown walking tour, and Destination Panama City can also assist with requests for step-on guides, said Jennifer Vigil, the organization’s president and CEO. WWW.DESTINATIONPANAMACITY.COM

Historic Dodgertown VERO BEACH, FLORIDA

HISTORIC DODGERTOWN

In his book, “Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy,” author Jules Tygiel described Historic Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida, as a “haven of tolerance” from the Jim Crow society waiting outside its gates.

Courtesy Historic Dodgertown Historic Dodgertown was founded in 1948 and was the first fully integrated major league baseball (MLB) spring training site in the South. For 60 years, the Dodgers, located first in Brooklyn and later in Los Angeles, held their spring training at the facility.

Today, Historic Dodgertown is an 80-acre, year-round sports and Dodgers management were key in breaking conference center, said Ruth Ruiz, director of marketing. Although it no professional baseball’s race barrier. From 1945 longer hosts Dodgers spring training, the facility still often has games, to 1946, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed seven many free.

Groups can call in advance to determine availability for of the first nine African-American players to games and can take self-guided walking tours or schedule guided tours. professional contracts, and Jackie Robinson WWW.HISTORICDODGERTOWN.COM was the first African-American to play in the MLB when the Dodgers started him on first base April 15, 1947.

Newtown Alive During the time of Jim Crow segregation in the Deep South, Historic Dodgertown had SARASOTA, FLORIDA shared living quarters, a shared dining room and shared recreation for all players.

In 1962, several years before local schools The Newtown Alive project in Sarasota, Florida, kicked off in 2015, were integrated, the Dodgertown director did and after two years of extensive research and oral history collection, away with segregated seating, water fountains it culminated in 2017 with 15 historic markers and a trolley tour that and bathrooms in Holman Stadium. highlights Newtown’s important sites and people.

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Courtesy Newtown Alive

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African-Americans built a strong community within Sarasota, beginning in 1884 in the segregated neighborhood of Overtown; that was followed by Newtown, which was established in 1914.

However, Sarasota was a “sundown town,” meaning black people weren’t allowed outside their community after sundown, said Vickie Oldham, director of Newtown Alive. Eventually, members of the black community started asserting their rights for equal access, “including at our beautiful beaches,” she said.

Neil Humphrey Sr., owner of Humphrey’s Pharmacy and the first president of the Sarasota County NAACP, began organizing carpools for public beach “wade-ins.” Humphrey led the first caravan to Lido Beach in September 1955; a headline in the Tampa Morning Tribune read, “Sarasotans Calm as Negroes Swim at City’s Lido Beach.”

The caravans continued in some form for years, but Humphrey didn’t declare Sarasota’s beaches officially integrated until a couple of years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed.

Trolley tours highlight historic Overtown and Newtown sites and take groups over the same bridge protestors took to Lido Beach. “So when we ride across the bridge, it feels like the atmosphere changes for me,” Oldham said.

JACKIE ROBINSON PRACTICING AT DODGERTOWN

Courtesy Historic Dodgertown

“There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.”

— JACK IE ROBINSON

Courtesy Historic Dodgertown

MOORE MEMORIAL PARK AND MUSEUM Courtesy Moore Memorial Park

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FROM THE G R EAT ES T FOR ALL TH E P E OPLE

During the tour, a Freedom Song leader leads the group in song, and one of the tour’s signatures is having “a pioneer step on board at one of those markers and share their personal story.” For example, a former student may step on at Booker High School, or the daughter of the cook and driver who worked at an area estate may step on there.

WWW.NEWTOWNALIVE.ORG

Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Memorial Park and Museum MIMS, FLORIDA Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette V. Moore, were the forerunners of the modern civil rights era in Florida. The two schoolteachers were leading a comfortable life, but when Harry received a flyer about the NAACP, “he said that was what he was waiting for,” said Sonya Mallard, cultural center coordinator for the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Memorial Park and Museum in Mims, Florida.

Harry fought for three things, Mallard said: equal pay for black teachers, the right to vote and an end to lynchings.

In 1934, he organized the first Brevard County branch of the NAACP and became its president. In 1945, he formed the Florida Progressive Voters League. Through his efforts, he helped 116,000 blacks register to vote, which attracted the attention of the Ku Klux Klan.

The 12-acre campus includes a 5,000-square-foot museum and cultural center, a walking trail with informational kiosks and a replica of the Moores’ house that the Klan bombed on Christmas night 1951, killing them both.

In the museum, visitors can see the Moores’ signatures in a 1929 voter registration handbook and a 1951 article about the explosion along with a splinter of the original house.

Visitors can also tour the replica house, which sits on the original site.

WWW.HARRYHARRIETTEMOORE.ORG

National Historic Preservation District ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA

Visit the Muhammad Ali Center: 2-1/2 levels of award-winning exhibits designed to inspire and motivate every person to Greatness.

144 North 6th Street, Louisville, KY 40202 32

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Some of the most iconic images of the civil rights movement came out of St. Augustine, Florida; for example, the 1964 photo of James Brock pouring bleach into the swimming pool at Monson Motor Lodge as black activists swam to protest the hotel’s whites-only policy.

Protestors took to St. Augustine’s streets for marches and held sits-ins, and eventually, Martin Luther King Jr. joined their efforts.

The Lincolnville Historic District is an area of the city that was established by freedmen after the Civil War. Though Lincolnville was a thriving community, “people were fed up with” segregation, said Regina Gayle Phillips, executive director of the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center.

At the museum, housed in the city’s first black high school, visitors can learn more about civil rights efforts in St. Augustine and even see the fingerprint card from King’s arrest there in 1964.

Many of the marches started in Lincolnville, Phillips said, and King spoke at St. Paul AME Church, just down the block from the museum.

Foot soldiers made numerous night marches to the downtown Plaza de la Constitución, where today, groups can see the Foot Soldiers Monument remembering those who fought for racial equality.

The Accord Freedom Trail includes 31 sites that celebrate the city’s role in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including the Accord Civil Rights museum, which opened in 2014.

WWW.FLORIDASHISTORICCOAST.COM

YOU’VE HEARD OF DRED SCOTT.

See where his case—and the Civil Rights Movement—began.

Step into history at the Old Courthouse in St. Louis where Dred Scott famously fought for his freedom from slavery. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Scott was not considered a citizen and had no right to sue – but his bold move marked the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Learn more about this landmark event in the historic courthouse where it all began at the newly renovated Gateway Arch National Park.

Plan your trip at VisitMO.com.

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THE FREEDOM HOUSE CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM PRESERVES THE SITE OF THE ONLY REMAINING FREEDOM HOUSE IN MISSISSIPPI.

These museums share civil rights moments

S

BY R ACHEL C A RTER

cholar and historian Asa G. Hilliard III once said, “Whatever you do, never let them begin our history with slavery.�

In destinations along the Civil Rights Trail, local museums feature special exhibits that tell the stories of African-American experiences and how the civil rights movement impacted the communities. These museums take visitors back to the ancient kingdoms of Africa before European colonization, show guests the thriving black communities that survived during the Jim Crow era and lead groups through the American civil rights movement, including the Freedom Rides and the voter registration campaigns.

CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL.COM Courtesy USCRT

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Visitors to these museums will learn about President Harry Truman’s executive order to desegregate the military and how his insistence — and the start of the Korean War — helped speed up the process. Groups will also learn about Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood and Little Rock’s bustling West Ninth Street business district.

APEX MUSEUM

APEX Museum ATLANTA The APEX (African-American Panoramic Experience) Museum in Atlanta is housed in a 1910 building on Auburn Avenue. When visitors first arrive, they step into the Trolley Car Theater — and onto a trolley — to watch two videos: “The Journey” and “Sweet Auburn: Street of Pride.”

Courtesy APEX Museum Another exhibit, “Africa: The Untold Story,” begins in Africa 8,500 years ago and delves into the technological, agricultural and architectural advancements of ancient Egypt and other African societies before European colonization.

From there, guests delve into the transFreedom House Canton Civil Rights Museum Atlantic slave trade. They will step through a replica of the Door of No Return — the CANTON, MISSISSIPPI original is located at Elmina, a trading post the Portuguese built in 1482 in modern-day Ghana — and into the hold of the White Lion Glen Cotton’s grandparents owned a small duplex in Canton, replica slave-trading vessel.

Mississippi. At one time, it housed an apartment on one side and an ice “When they walked out that door for cream parlor on the other. the last time, they saw their shores for the When the city sent Cotton a letter in 2012 telling him to fix it up last time,” said Deborah Strahorn, the or tear it down, “I started researching, and I ended up deciding I was museum’s special projects coordinator and going to turn the house into a museum,” he said. storyteller-in-residence.

That’s because the duplex is the only remaining Freedom House Visitors will see authentic shackles, an in Mississippi. Beginning in 1963, it served as the Congress of Racial authentic slave patrol badge and several slave Equality’s (CORE’s) office and Madison County base and even weltags. comed Martin Luther King Jr. and James Meredith when they visited, The museum’s re-creation of the Yates and although they spent most of their time across the street at Cotton’s Milton Drugstore in Atlanta, which was owned grandparents’ house. by the first black certified pharmacist, features At the house, CORE organized protests, marches and voter registramany items that were in the original store. tion drives. The humble structure even survived an attempted bombGroups can also arrange for Strahorn to pering in 1964: The bomb ricocheted off the house and exploded on the form a historical character portrait of Adrienne sidewalk, Cotton said.

Herndon, the wife of one of America’s first Cotton renovated the building and amassed a collection of artifacts black millionaires, who “has her own story to and memorabilia, including pictures of people from the movement in tell,” Strahorn said. the house. Residents in the community donated items and help, and the WWW.APEXMUSEUM.ORG Canton Freedom House Civil Rights Museum opened its door in 2013.

“We still have a few people who live in Canton; they still feel like the house is sort of like their church,” Cotton said.

During a tour, Cotton tells about how George Raymond came to connect with his grandparents to use the house as a CORE office, how doing so led to a boycott of his grandparents’ grocery store that sat across the street and how his grandparents also allowed CORE to use their neighboring house for a Freedom School and living quarters for activists and volunteers.

FREEDOMHOUSECANTON.ORG

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n Memphis, Tennessee’s Main Street, near the site of the former Shainberg’s department store, a historical marker commemorates the Lee Sisters, who, as the marker notes, made Memphis better because they “stood up by sitting down in forbidden seats.”

Elaine Lee Turner and her four sisters were arrested not just once, but 17 times for their sit-ins at department store lunch counters, restaurants and other segregated businesses throughout Memphis during the early 1960s.

“They called the Lee Sisters the most arrested civil rights family,” said Turner, who was arrested for the first time at Shainberg’s in 1960 at age 16, a day that saw all five sisters arrested at various lunch counters along Main Street simultaneously.

“Our parents supported us in what we were doing,” she said. “We knew we had to persist, and if that meant getting arrested, then that was what it was going to take.”

Encouraged by the black community’s embrace of students who sat in at Memphis’ two public libraries in March 1960, Turner and her sisters became inspired to sit in anyplace that was segregated.

“The wheels of justice were not turning fast enough for the youth,” said Turner, who, with her sisters and four brothers, also participated in the national movement, including the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965 and the 1966 Meredith March Against Fear. “We wanted to make a change as soon as possible. We knew that we had to continue the fight, the sit-ins, the marches and whatever we were doing as a form of protest.”

ELAINE LEE TURNER: FIGHTING SEGREGATION

FOR MORE CIVIL RIGHTS STORIES, VISIT VIMEO.COM/CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL

travel a trail that changed the path of our entire country.

North Carolina is filled with many paths but only one U.S. Civil Rights Trail.

Immerse your next group in the historical significance NC played in the fight for American civil rights.

Visit F.W. Woolworth’s lunch counter, the catalyst for the sit-in movement, and other historical locations in our state.

CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL.COM Photo Credits: Keenan Hairston and Visit Raleigh

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Mosaic Templars Cultural Center LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS

MOSAIC

TEMPLARS

CULTURAL CENTER

A CHILDREN’S WORKSHOP AT MOSAIC TEMPLARS CULTURAL CENTER Photos courtesy Mosaic Templars Cultural Center

The Mosaic Templars of America was a black fraternal organization founded in 1883 in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center was going to be housed in the Templar’s original 1913 building, which was being renovated for the museum when a fire destroyed the structure in 2005.

The loss of the original structure, however, opened a door to build a larger, state-of-the-art museum on the same site, and the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center opened in 2008.

When people think of Little Rock and civil rights, they often know about the integration of Little Rock Central High School, but “they don’t know much about the dynamic of black culture and life, especially in Arkansas,” center director Christina Shutt said.

The museum’s “City Within a City” and “Entrepreneurial Spirit” exhibits focus on the thriving West Ninth Street business district and the area’s black culture, black community and black-owned businesses when Jim Crow laws kept residents from shopping and using services elsewhere in the city.

The museum has “a great collection” from Velvatex College of Beauty Culture, the oldest operating beauty school in the state of Arkansas; the school has been owned by black women for its entire 90 years.

At the center, visitors are often surprised to learn about Hoxie Schools, a school district that integrated “relatively peacefully” before Central High, Shutt said.

In addition to guided tours, groups can arrange for custom presentations in the center’s 400-seat auditorium. For example, the center arranged for the filmmaker of the “Dream Land: Little Rock’s West Ninth Street” documentary to speak to a group of college students.

WWW.MOSAICTEMPLARSCENTER.COM

Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum

TRACE THE PATHS THEY WALKED From the Emmett Till story that began at Bryant’s Grocery to the “Black Power” speech made by Stokely Carmichael at Broad Street park, Greenwood witnessed firsthand a slow, but certain shift in the winds of justice. A gathering spirit of hope, promise, and determination that awakened the nation and mobilized the American Civil Rights Movement. We welcome group tours and invite you to learn more about our ties to this monumental movement.

Photo by Bob Fitch, courtesy Stanford University Libraries.

225 Howard Street | Greenwood, MS 38930 | 662.453.9197 www.visitgreenwood.com

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INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed an executive order declaring “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” The order also created a committee to integrate all branches of the military.

The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum places Truman’s civil rights decisions in the broader context of Truman’s bid for election in 1948.

“People think of civil rights and the election as two separate things, but they’re

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really going on at the same time,” said education director Mark Adams.

In February 1948, Truman delivered a special message to Congress on civil rights.

In July, the Democratic Party split at the Democratic National Convention, with three dozen Southern Democrats walking out in protest of Truman’s nomination. Less than two weeks later, Truman signed the executive order to desegregate the military.

In the museum’s Decision Theater, groups learn about Truman’s civil rights efforts and his decision to recognize Israel, and then vote on his motivation: Was it to gain votes in an election year? Was he following his conscience? Or was there some other motivation?

At a replica train car like the one Truman spoke from during his whistle-stop campaign, visitors can pick up handsets and choose from 75 different Truman speeches, many of which discuss civil rights issues.

Visitors will also see political cartoons, campaign buttons and an original copy of the infamous newspaper splashed with the incorrect headline “Dewey Defeats Truman,” complete with Truman’s handwriting on the top.

Groups of 15 or more can arrange guided tours at least four weeks in advance.

WWW.TRUMANLIBRARY.ORG

ROBERT TYRONE PATTERSON SR. LUNCH COUNTER SIT-INS

I

The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is shining a light on the state’s rich and complex story. Since opening its doors in December of 2017, the museum compels visitors to reflect on the state’s complicated history with incredibly in-depth, moving exhibits. Don’t miss out on the true stories responsible for shaping a state and influencing the world.

V IS IT M IS S IS S IP PI.ORG /TOU RS

MISSISSIPPI CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL.COM 40 JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

n one of the pivotal moments of the civil rights movement, the Greensboro Four — Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond and Joseph McNeil, all students at North Carolina A&T University — sat down at the Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro on February 1, 1960, ordered coffees and refused to leave when denied service.

Twenty-five students, including Robert Tyrone Patterson Sr., then an A&T freshman, returned to continue the sit-in the next day. By the fourth day, it had grown to include 300 students, with thousands participating in the end before Woolworths finally desegregated its counter in July 1960.

The event captured national media attention, launched dozens of simultaneous sit-ins throughout the South and is credited as the impetus for the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1960.

A section of the Greensboro Woolworths counter now sits in the Smithsonian Museum; another portion is preserved at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro.

Patterson, who sat in at the counter daily throughout the protest, knew that what he was doing wasn’t without danger. But he didn’t let that stop him. “I concluded I know it’s the right thing to do. And I will just worry about that if it happens,” said Patterson, who, following college, enjoyed a long career in bank management in Greensboro.

To pass time during his sit-in, Patterson reflected on the injustices he’d endured growing up — sitting only at the top of movie houses, getting food from a window in the back of businesses — and an epiphany came.

“I started thinking about all of that, and I [realized] this should have happened a long time ago. And I’m going to do all I can to make sure that my kids don’t have to go through this,” he said.

FOR MORE CIVIL RIGHTS STORIES, VISIT VIMEO.COM/CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL

V i si tNO P C . com

One cannot step foot into New Orleans Plantation Country without experiencing the impact of African-American culture. Our art, language, folklore and, of course, food are woven deep into the fabric of this region. First brought to Louisiana through capture and oppression, enslaved Africans are the historical foundation of agricultural and economic success of the area and its plantations.

Out here, you will learn about how the intelligence and skill of Africans dictated the architecture of the plantation estates and structures. Tours, memorials and knowledgeable guides present the perspectives of the enslaved through first-person narratives and educational exhibits. Hear about the lives of African-Americans after slavery, living during segregation under Jim Crow laws.

Explore the African-American owned businesses and family owned restaurants to experience how African heritage is rooted in all aspects of history, and shapes the current landscape of area. Taste your way through Creole kitchens for an authentic understanding of the famous flavors that originated out here and are enjoyed around the world.

The immersive experiences available in New Orleans Plantation Country educate visitors and honor the history of African-Americans that resounds throughout the River Parishes of Louisiana.

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Freedom Rides Museum MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA

Experience the past. inspire the Future.

Twenty Freedom Riders stepped off a bus on May 20, 1961, at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, Alabama. Though none of them were older than 22, they had prepared wills and farewell letters — and they had prepared to remain peaceful in the face of violence as they protested racial segregation in public transportation. Despite officials’ promises to protect the Freedom Riders, police were nowhere to be found as a mob of about 300 angry segregationists attacked the peaceful protestors that morning.

Today, that very bus station is a historic landmark and home to the Freedom Rides Museum, which opened in 2011. The current exhibit, “Traveling Down Freedom’s Main Line,” features photographs, original works of art and videotaped oral histories of Freedom Riders, “some of whom were among the students who were attacked here that day,” said site director Dorothy Walker.

The bus station also features the original colored entrance, something that is relatively rare today. The museum included the now blocked up entrance as part of its interpretive experience because most segregated entrances have been entirely erased.

Groups learn about how, when black passengers stepped through that entrance, they still found themselves outside, waiting on the bus platform, “so it was extra layers of humiliation,” Walker said.

Guests have to ask themselves, “Was this the cheapest, fastest thing to do, or did they think they would need it again?” she added.

In addition to discounts and guided tours for groups, the museum may be able to arrange for a presentation from an original Freedom Rider.

“There’s nothing like hearing the story of what happened to a young Freedom Rider and listening to them recount their experiences in that space,” Walker said.

AHC.ALABAMA.GOV

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Tours: Every hour from 10-3 5099 HWY 18 | Wallace, LA 70049 | 225-265-3300

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w h i t n e y p l a n tat i o n . c o m

INTERVIEWING AN INTERPRETER AT THE FREEDOM RIDES MUSEUM

Courtesy Freedom Rides Museum

EXPERIENCE THE LEGENDS OF LOUISVILLE

Muhammad Ali™; Rights of Publicity and Persona Rights: ABG Muhammad Ali Enterprises LLC. ali.com. Photo by Ken Regan © 2015 Muhammad Ali Enterprises LLC

Civil Rights history is woven throughout the fabric of Louisville. World-class museums, cultural centers and significant historical landmarks allow visitors to celebrate this history while experiencing Louisville’s modern attractions and award-winning restaurants.

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“THE SIEGE OF FIRST BAPTIST” TOOK PLACE AT FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH IN MONTGOMERY IN 1961.

Collective resolve coalesced in these churches

D

BY ROBIN ROEN K ER

Courtesy USCRT

uring the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, black churches across the South served not only as places of worship and spiritual refuge, but also as much-needed meeting centers where activists and citizens alike could convene to share ideals, support the fight for equal rights and plan proactive resistance to the stifling status quo of Jim Crow-era segregation.

Thanks to their essential role in the fight for equality, black churches throughout the region — in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and beyond — have been enshrined as places of significance along the Civil Rights Trail.

Here, we share the stories of five African-American CIVILRIGHTSTRAIL.COM churches whose legacies will be forever linked with a

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movement that advanced both human rights and democracy for black Southerners — changing America for the better in the process.

Springfield Baptist Church GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA

BETHEL

BAPTIST

CHURCH

Founded in 1867 by former slaves — just four years after emancipation —Springfield Baptist Church is the oldest black Baptist congregation in Greenville, South Carolina.

“There were roughly 65 original members, many of them household servants of white members of Greenville’s First Baptist Church,” said the Rev. John H. Corbitt, who has served as pastor at Springfield Baptist for nearly 40 years. “They decided they wanted to have their own congregation and were able to organize originally in the basement Courtesy USCRT of First Baptist.”

In 1872, Springfield Baptist Church acquired land to build its own worship space on McBee Avenue, where it stood until a fire destroyed the building in 1972. The congregapastor J.S. Hall (1957-1963) during much of the movement. Famed civil tion remains active but in a new facility roughly rights activist Jessie Jackson, a native of Greenville, was also a member two blocks from the original building, which of the congregation as a young man, Corbitt said. played a pivotal role in the civil right moveSpringfield found itself in the spotlight in January 1960 when it spearment of Greenville. headed a peaceful march from the church to the Greenville Downtown “The local branch of the NAACP was Airport to protest that baseball great Jackie Robinson, who had come to organized at Springfield Baptist Church. The town to address a state NAACP convention, was denied access to the Greenville Urban League was organized here,” airport’s waiting room.

Corbitt said, noting that the church was led by “Almost all of the civil rights activities in town would start at Springfield Baptist Church,” Corbitt said. “Marches to demonstrate at the lunch counter would start here. Marches to integrate the library would start here. This was the unofficial headquarters of the [Greenville] movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.”

WWW.SPRINGFIELDBAPTIST.COM

SPRINGFIELD BAPTIST CHURCH

Bethel Baptist Church BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Courtesy Springfield Baptist Church

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Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church was home to one the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement: the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who served as pastor there from 1953 through 1961.

In 1956, Shuttlesworth formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to fill the void when an injunction by the Alabama circuit courts outlawed NAACP activities in the state.

Shuttlesworth was also one of the key figures — along with King, Bayard Rustin, C.K Steele and Ralph Abernathy — behind the 1957 formation of SCLC. In 1961, Bethel Baptist Church served as a designated point of contact in Alabama for the Freedom Riders.

A HISTORIC PHOTO FROM A BOMBING AT BETHEL BAPTIST CHURCH

Courtesy Bethel Baptist Church

“Almost all of the civil rights activities in town would start at Springfield Baptist Church. This was the unofficial headquarters of the [Greenville] movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.”

— R EV. JOHN H. COR BI T T

CLARK MEMORIAL UNITED METHODIST

CHURCH

Courtesy USCRT

Because of Shuttlesworth’s activism, Bethel Baptist was the target of repeated bombings. A 1956 Christmas night blast rocked the church’s parsonage, with Shuttlesworth and his family inside. Miraculously, no one was hurt. The church was bombed again in 1958 and 1962.

“He told the congregation after the first bombing that if they wanted him to resign, he would, but that he would continue the fight,” said the Rev. Thomas L. Wilder Jr., current pastor of Bethel Baptist Church.

“We view Rev. Shuttlesworth as the architect of the modern civil rights movement,” said Martha Bouyer, executive director of the Historic Bethel Baptist Church. “He moved it from a one-item protest; mostly, to that point, it had been about the bus. He started to protest these unfair laws as related to schools, restaurants, trying on clothes at department stores, voting rights, access to government and police jobs. He addressed segregation at its very core, in all areas at the same time.”

Shuttlesworth traveled to sit-ins and boycotts throughout the South, bringing effective ideas for nonviolent protests back to Birmingham with him, Bouyer said. He also challenged many aspects of segregation in the court system.

“Rev. Shuttlesworth was slightly ahead of his time in understanding the full impact and power of civil disobedience,” said Alabama historian Richard Bailey.

“He was the one that invited Dr. King to Birmingham in 1963,” Bouyer said. The police brutality on display during the Birmingham Campaign, which was publicized nationwide, is credited with contributing to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Shuttlesworth’s more confrontational style was a contrast to King’s, but there was a mutual respect between them. In his memoir of the Birmingham Campaign, King praised Shuttlesworth’s “fiery words and determined zeal.”

“Dr. King said about Rev. Shuttlesworth that he brought a type of militancy to this whole issue of civil rights that hadn’t been there before,” Bouyer said.

The congregation now worships in a new sanctuary built in 1995.

The original church building has been preserved as a monument to the civil rights movement, and in 2007, it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

WWW.BETHELCOLLEGEVILLE.ORG

Clark Memorial United Methodist Church NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE Clark Memorial United Methodist Church provided a central meeting place for leaders of the civil rights movement in Nashville, Tennessee.

The church served as headquarters for the Nashville office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and its location near several Nashville universities brought a steady stream of young activists through its doors.

Noted activist James Lawson, a student at Vanderbilt University at the time of the civil rights movement, led workshops on nonviolent civil

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disobedience at the church. John Lewis, a college student who later became a national civil rights leader and longtime congressman from Georgia, was one of the attendees.

“The students involved in those meetings came from Vanderbilt University, Tennessee State University, Fisk University and American Baptist College,” said church historian Marilyn Talbert. “Rev. A.M. Anderson was the pastor at that time [1959-1965], and the students were having so many gatherings, he finally gave them a key [to the building].”

Founded originally in 1865 as a school and worship center for newly freed slaves, the current church building, built in 1981, sits on the same site where the congregation has worshiped since 1943.

“It’s important for people to understand the sacrifice and struggles that people went through in that particular era, just as it’s important to know something about the earlier [19th century] efforts of AfricanAmericans to secure freedom and rights,” Talbert said. “As generations change, we need to know and preserve that history.”

WWW.CLARKUMCNASHVILLE.ORG

ALABAMA CIVIL RIGHTS

INSTITUTE AND ZION BAPTIST CHURCH

By Todd Stone, courtesy ACRI

SYBIL JORDAN HAMPTON: INTEGRATING HIGH SCHOOL

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Photos courtesy Albany CVB

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S

ybil Jordan Hampton grew up in the segregated South, where even as a young child, she understood there were certain spaces and privileges not accessible to her.

“My parents trained my brother and myself very carefully [so that] when we were alone, we knew that if you got on the bus, you went to the back,” said Hampton, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas.

“If you were in a department store, you looked for things that said ‘Colored,’ whether the bathroom or the water fountain. You did not expect to go into Walgreens and sit at the lunch counter. All of those things are very stark memories for me — the rules that you had to learn.”

Eventually, laws stripped away the legality of “separate but equal.” But perceptions and prejudices took much longer to change.

In 1959, Hampton was part of the second group of students to desegregate Little Rock Central High School, following the tumultuous 1957 enrollment of the Little Rock Nine.

Once there, she was faced with a raw truth: “I was always going to be ‘other,’” Hampton said. “The experience of three years [there] was that we were shunned. Absolutely no one in my homeroom spoke to me. As time went on, I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do or say in my classes that would ever change the perception of me as being unworthy, not wanted, not welcomed.”

But Hampton persisted, graduating in 1962 to go on to college, graduate school and a distinguished career as a higher education administrator and philanthropist. “I was committed to the struggle of my people,” she said.

“That kept me being able to keep my head up, doing what I had to do.”

ALBANY, GEORGIA In 1961, Shiloh Baptist Church helped foster a broad, citywide civil rights initiative that became known as the Albany Movement.

“The role of Shiloh was very key,” said W. Frank Wilson, executive director of the Albany Civil Rights Institute. “When the movement started, there was a need for a place to have meetings, and the late Rev. H.G. Boyd opened the doors of Shiloh.”

Boyd had also made the church available to Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers who had come to Albany to work on voter registration, Wilson said.

In December 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Albany to speak at the invitation of his friend, W.G. Anderson, who was president of the Albany Movement. The crowd to hear King overflowed both Shiloh Baptist and Mount Zion Church across the street, another “major player in the movement,” Wilson said, so much so that by the end of the evening, King had to make not just one, but three separate addresses, alternating between the churches, to accommodate the roughly 1,500 people who came.

“As a result, Dr. King ended up spending the night and leading a march, and was even arrested in Albany,” Wilson said.

Shiloh’s involvement in the movement did not come without danger: “Rev. Boyd would tell a story that one Sunday as he got up to give his sermon, an usher brought a note that said there was a bomb under the church. But he chose not to read it [to the congregation] because he felt that the note was intended to incite hysteria and panic,” Wilson said. “And his belief was, if he had to go, then there was no better place to go than in church.”

WWW.SHILOHBAPT325ALBANYGA.ORG

FREEDOM

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Shiloh Baptist Church

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SHILOH BAPTIST CHURCH

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First Baptist Church MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA

“In recognizing the humanity of

On May 21, 1961, King spoke in a darkened sanctuary of Montgomery’s our fellow beings, we pay ourselves First Baptist Church. Gathered there was a group of roughly 1,500 Freedom Riders, church members and other civil rights activists who had the highest tribute.” taken refuge in the building following violence at the city’s Greyhound bus station. Outside, the Klan surrounded them. The nearly 15-hour Photos courtesy Missouri Historical Society standoff became known as “the siege of First Baptist.”

— TH URGOOD M A RSH A LL , On that tense night, King and Abernathy, First Baptist Church’s pastor U. S. SUPR EME COURT J USTICE (1952-1961) and himself one of the civil rights movement’s leading national figures, found themselves on the phone with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asking for federal protection from the violent mob outside, which had begun to break windows and throw tear gas. Ultimately, National Guard troops In 1957, the church hosted the first Institute on Nonviolence and were dispatched to safely lead the activists Social Change, sponsored by SCLC. It was during a meeting at First out of the church.

Baptist Church in 1958 that civil rights leader Lewis, the youngest of the Earlier in the movement, the church so-called Big Six leaders of the movement, initially met and befriended had housed mass meetings to help Abernathy and King. organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

“Ralph Abernathy and Dr. King partnered together in doing both Both the church and the parsonage were the bus boycott as well as the Freedom Riders,” said the Rev. E. Baxter bombed in 1957, but Abernathy and his Morris, who has served as pastor of First Baptist Church since 1972. congregation persisted.

“Their pathways were always linked.”

Despite First Baptist’s active role in the 20th-century civil rights movement, Alabama historian Bailey said the church’s social activism dates back to its founding in 1866. Nathan Ashby, pastor of the church from 1866 to 1870, served as the first president of the Colored Baptist Convention of Alabama, and in 1890, the church hosted the first baccalaureate service of the State Normal School, now Alabama State University.

“The first civil rights bill to be introduced to the Alabama Legislature was submitted by a member of First Baptist Church in February 1873,” Bailey said.

WWW.FIRSTBAPTISTCHURCH MONTGOMERY.COM

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This courthouse

CHANGED

A NATION. Make history meaningful with a visit to the Bay County Courthouse, site of a 1963 landmark case that changed our nation’s court system.

In Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court ruled that states are required under the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to provide an attorney to defendants in criminal cases who are unable to afford their own lawyers.

After stopping at the courthouse, explore the history of the St. Andrews neighborhood and downtown Panama City with self-guided walking tours. Find out more at destinationpanamacity.com/walkingtour

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