Getting the flavor of … Alabama’s civil-rights memorials, and more

Alabama is filled with monuments and scars that tell the story of African-Americans’ long struggle for equality.

Alabama’s civil-rights memorials

There is no single “civil-rights trail” in Alabama, said Scott Vogel in The Washington Post. The entire state is filled with monuments and scars that tell the story of African-Americans’ long struggle for equality. Montgomery, the state capital, “will forever be associated with Rosa Parks and the 1955 bus boycott.” Martin Luther King Jr. was once senior pastor of the church now known as Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist, which offers regular tours. Birmingham, 90 miles to the north, once had a reputation as “the most segregated city in the South.” Now it’s home to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. On display there are the pale green bars of the cell in which King “wrote his famous ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’” and a replica of a firebombed Greyhound bus similar to the ones traveled in by the Freedom Riders, who advanced the cause of desegregation in southern towns. In 1965, Selma was the scene of a “bloody confrontation” between civil-rights marchers and police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

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