Civil Rights Tour Day Four - Birmingham

Day Four of the Civil Rights Tour took our group to Birmingham, Ala., which Dr. Martin Luther King once described as the most thoroughly segregated city he had ever seen.

Our first stop was the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. This landmark was the site of a Ku Klux Klan bombing on Sept. 15, 1963, that claimed the lives of teen church members Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. 

This heinous act outraged the nation and was pivotal in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

Our group then walked across the street to the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum. This sprawling center houses a variety of memorabilia documenting the origins of Birmingham as a mining town in the 1800s, its violent past as a segregated city that offered a substandard quality of life to African Americans and  its current status as a more progressive place that has been governed by people of color since the election of Richard Arrington Jr. as its first black mayor in 1979.

While browsing the museum, our group was able to piggyback on a guided tour led by an engaging young African-American docent. He was leading a group of middle-school boys from England, educating them about ugly chapters from U.S. history and how far we've come since then. 

As an unexpected treat, the boys raised their voices and serenaded their docent at the end of the tour. Apparently, the boys are a choir who are performing in Birmingham this evening.

The next stop in Birmingham, once again, was a short walk across the street: Kelly Ingram Memorial Park. In early May 1963, police and firemen attacked civil rights demonstrators, many of them children, in the streets surrounding this park.

I made my way through the park following a brick path called the Freedom 

Walk. Lining the path are enormous statues memorializing the civil rights demonstrators such as bronze dogs lunging in attack and a replica of a holding cell emblazoned with the phrase, "I'm Not Afraid of Your Jail."

I'm glad Birmingham is owning up to and embracing its past, which will enable the city and its citizens to continue to move

forward.

As I write this post, our tour group is traveling to our last stop: Memphis, where Dr. King was assassinated.