The Wall Street Journal: Touring the Civil Rights Trail
March 11, 2009

The Alabama Civil Rights Trail was the feature article of the Travel Section in the March 7 edition of The Wall Street Journal. State tourism director Lee Sentell and communication director Edith Parten met with writer Candace Jackson and accompanied her to several civil rights sites when she visited the state in February.




From the article “Touring the Civil Rights Trail: Alabama wants visitors to walk in the footsteps of demonstrators and Dr. King” by Candace Jackson in the March 7 edition of The Wall Street Journal:

To attract tourists, Alabama has long promoted its white sand beaches, Civil War battlegrounds and antebellum mansions. Now, with the election of Barack Obama and a surge of interest in the civil rights movement, the state is trying to attract visitors to the sites of church bombings and police attacks on demonstrators. This month the state will release a newly expanded Civil Rights Trail guide that prominently features pictures of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and President Obama on the cover. A new video the state made to show tour operators begins with a sound clip from an Obama speech when he mentions the voting rights marches in Selma and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. "The significant events that took place in Alabama during the American civil rights struggle were the forerunner to President Obama's election," says a voiceover during the ad. "In Alabama, you can see where history was made."

Revisiting unflattering incidents from the past, such as when city commissioners in the Birmingham area filled swimming pools and closed parks rather than integrate, hasn't always been easy for Alabama. For decades, tourism marketers have emphasized Civil War attractions, such as the First White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery. Those sites are still a big draw, but in recent years the focus has shifted to the civil rights movement, in which Alabama was considered ground zero. Three churches have been nominated for designation as Unesco World Heritage sites, including the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, where Dr. King was pastor in the 1950s, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four young girls were killed in a 1963 bombing and where more than 8,000 mourners attended a public funeral. Several tour operators now offer civil rights-themed itineraries. Pro-Tran tours, in Fort Washington, Md., has the "Black Heritage Civil Rights Experience," an eight-day bus trip roughly following the life of Dr. King, with stops in Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma and Memphis. The company says it has four buses booked for 2009. It booked only one last year.

In October, the National Park Service opened the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, honoring the first black Air Force cadets. The park service has plans to build interpretive centers in Selma and Montgomery focusing on the 1965 Voting Rights March between the two cities; a center in Lowndes County, about midway between, opened in 2006. Many of the state's most popular civil rights attractions, like the Rosa Parks Library & Museum in Montgomery and the Dexter Avenue parsonage where Dr. King once lived, have opened to the public within the past decade. Alabama's first state-issued Black Heritage Guide, a pamphlet highlighting a few landmarks, came out in 1983, when the once staunchly segregationist George Wallace was still governor. (In the latter part of his career, he denounced many of his earlier views.)

On March 7, 1965, a day now known as "Bloody Sunday," hundreds of peaceful protesters left Selma, heading for Montgomery. As they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, high above the Alabama River, they ran into state troopers and local police wielding tear gas and billy clubs. Two more marches followed, culminating in the March 25 gathering of 25,000 people in Montgomery that pushed Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This weekend, Selma commemorates Bloody Sunday with its 16th annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee, with a re-enactment, lectures, music and a street festival. Alabama's tourism director, Lee Sentell, says, "The state tourism department has been consistently promoting civil rights tourism since 1983," the year of the first Black Heritage Guide. On a recent afternoon at the National Voting Rights Museum & Institute, which opened in Selma in 1992, a tour group examined black-and-white government surveillance photos of African-Americans at voting demonstrations dating from the 1960s. The protests began, a guide explained, after blacks were barred from voting because they couldn't answer questions like "How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?"

In Montgomery, the red brick Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, built on former slave-trading grounds, has been a black church since it was founded in 1877. It looks very much as it did when Dr. King was pastor, with bright stained-glass windows, pale-blue walls, a small balcony and dark wooden pews. Tourists can stand and look out from the pulpit where Dr. King once preached, and they can visit the basement, which has changed over the years, where movement leaders hatched plans for the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. Hanging at the entrance to the sanctuary is a poster of Barack and Michelle Obama with the words "A New Era." Also worth a visit is the Parsonage Museum, several blocks away, where Dr. King and his family once lived. A retired school teacher who says she once worked at a dry cleaner that laundered robes of Ku Klux Klansmen gives detailed guided tours. Church pastors lived in the parsonage until 1992, but now it's a museum that recreates the Kings' home, with chenille bedspreads, old jazz records and a 1950s-era telephone like the one that rang dozens of times a day with threatening calls. There are even cigarette butts in a living room ashtray, a nod to Dr. King's little-known smoking habit. Many items are the same ones Dr. King actually used, such as a dark wood dining room table, a living room couch and the frame of the bed where he slept. The front porch was famously bombed in 1956, while Coretta Scott King, baby Yolanda and a friend were at home.

Auburn University, working with the state, is highlighting some lesser-known sites for its own Alabama Civil Rights Heritage Trail. Among them are a house in White Hall where members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee used to stay. A humble white structure on cinder blocks, the house is virtually unchanged since the 1960s, except for a few homemade posterboard signs noting that the committee's panther logo would later be adopted by the Black Panthers. On the front lawn, Auburn architecture students created an abstract sculpture out of several white Plymouths that committee members used to drive, though there's no marker to explain that. Roger and Diane Noe recently traveled from Spooner, Wis., to visit some of Alabama's civil rights landmarks, including the Dexter Avenue church and Tuskegee University. They stood in front of the Maya Lin-designed Civil Rights Memorial sculpture in Montgomery, reading the engraved names of slain activists. Obama's election "kind of prompted us to say, 'OK, we gotta go see this,' " Mr. Noe said. "Maybe you need to come investigate in detail how far we have come."


What to do: The Rosa Parks Library and Museum, on Troy University's Montgomery campus, exhibits a life-size recreation of the bus where Ms. Parks refused to give up her seat. A video re-enactment of the scene plays on screens in the bus windows (Tel: 334-241-8615; $5.50 admission for adults, $3.50 for children; montgomery.troy.edu/rosaparks/museum).

The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where Dr. King served as head pastor and where the Montgomery Bus Boycott was planned, is open Tuesday through Saturday for guided tours starting every hour on the hour, and visitors are welcome to attend Sunday church services (334-263-3970). Seven blocks away is the Parsonage Museum, where Dr. King lived when his front porch was bombed in 1956. A church-and-parsonage tour is $7 for adults, $5 for children (334-261-3270; dexterkingmemorial.org). From Montgomery, Selma is about an hour's drive east on Highway 80 (the National Historic Trail). Stop at roughly the halfway point, at the National Park Service's Lowndes County Interpretive Center. In Selma, take a walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, although traffic can be heavy. Visit the nearby Voting Rights Museum & Institute, which explores the history of the voting rights movement ($6 admission; 334-418-0800; nvrm.org).

Where to stay: One of the newest lodging options in Montgomery is the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel & Spa. It's a convention hotel, but it's centrally located and rooms are comfortable and spacious (weekend rates start at $139 a night; renaissancemontgomery.com; 334-481-5000).

Where to eat: Martin's, in Montgomery, is an old-school Southern "meat and three" restaurant. Menu items often include fried chicken or catfish, which come with sides like rice and gravy or okra ($8 to $10 for entrées; 334-265-1767). Note: Martin's serves lunch six days a week and dinner on weeknights until 7:45 p.m. It's closed on Saturdays. Tomatino's Pizza and Bakeshop, in the charming Cloverdale neighborhood, serves focaccia sandwiches and regular and whole-wheat-crust pizza (pizzas run from $7.50 to $16.75; tomatinos.com; 334-264-4241).

For the complete article and photos see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638803034058571.html

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