Civil Rights Tour Day Three - Montgomery

After touring Selma this morning, the Civil Rights Tour took us back to Montgomery for a visit to the Rosa Parks Museum.

The guided tour began with a short documentary about the stifling segregation in Montgomery. The unbearable oppression prompted Rosa Parks' brave act of refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger.

 

Watching this video, a realization occurred to me: racism can turn a mundane, everyday act like riding the bus into a dehumanizing practice of apartheid.

The video also related that the organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott spread the word to participants via flyers produced on primitive mimeograph machines. These flyers were like the precursor to Facebook, Twitter and other modern social media employed by activists all over the world today.

It also occurred to me that the system of private cars that transported boycott participants to work and school while they avoided buses was like an early version of contemporary rideshare services like Uber.

Our tour bus then drove by the Greyhound bus station that has been converted into the Freedom Riders Museum. The site commemorates the activists who participated in the historic Freedom Rides in the summer of 1964.

The next stop was the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is dedicated to fighting hate crimes. I added my name to the center's Wall of Tolerance, which requires that you pledge to fight injustice, intolerance and hatred.

The next stop was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and so many of the milestones of the civil rights movement.

The final stop for the day was Dexter Baptist's "minister's home," where Dr. King, his wife Coretta and their children lived. 

My impression of this landmark is that it's a rather modest, one-story dwelling like any other middle class home of the era. With one exception: a crater on the cement front porch that is a remnant of when the home was fire-bombed.

We concluded the day with a communal meal at Martha's, a soul food restaurant that serves traditional Southern cuisine. I stuffed myself silly with black-eyes peas, cornbread, greens, peach cobbler and other delicious dishes. The food was as good as the fellowship between myself and my fellow travelers.

Now it's on to Birmingham and then Memphis for the fourth day of the Civil Rights Tour.