It’s our obligation to remember the past in hopes of making a better future. Here are over a dozen monuments, museums, and historical sites from the civil rights movement that every American needs to visit.
The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration . Opened in 2018 by the Equal Justice Initiative, and based in a former slave market, the Legacy Museum is an unflinching examination of the violence and inhumanity that preserved America’s racist system.
Its exhibits depict the suffering of slavery, the terror of lynching throughout the South between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, and how modern mass incarceration preserves the spirit of slavery under a legal guise. The Legacy Museum presents the crucial backstory ofBefore leaving The Legacy Museum, pay your respects at. Also maintained by the Equal Justice Initiative, it memorializes almost 4400 victims of racially-motivated lynching, with over 800 coffin-shaped steel structures bearing their names suspended from above. It’s elegantly designed and absolutely devastating., which lies on the same spot where Parks was arrested in 1955. The museum chronicles the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956, which was incited by Parks’ arrest and led to the Supreme Court determining that Alabama’s bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. This wasn’t the first civil rights protest in America, but it was the galvanizing event that sparked the movement that changed America., which is based in the former Greyhound bus station where Black and white Freedom Riders were attacked by Alabama residents during the 1961 Freedom Ride. The museum pays tribute to those riders and the violence they faced while traveling throughout Alabama that May.. Designed by Maya Lin, who also gave us the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the centerpiece is a granite fountain inscribed with a timeline of the movement from 1955 to 1968 and the names of 41 activists who lost their lives during that time. Like the Vietnam memorial, it’s a stark monument to those we’ve lost., from whose steps King addressed over 25,000 protesters in March 1965 after marching from Selma. In a speech popularly known as “How Long, Not Long,” King quoted a 19th century abolitionist when he declared “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s one of King’s most powerful and celebrated speeches, capping off one of the most tumultuous months of the entire movement.West of Montgomery you’ll find Selma, a once-thriving small Southern city best known today for its pivotal role in the civil rights movement. In March 1965 the SCLC tried to lead three marches from Selma to Montgomery in protest of Alabama’s systematic denial of Black voting rights. The first march was met with violence from Alabama state troopers, with photographs of organizers being beaten and gassed by the cops bringing worldwide attention to the marches. Without these marches exposing voting rights discrimination in Alabama, and the level of violence the state would go to to preserve it, the Voting Rights Act might not have passed in 1965. Today in Selma you can visit the, a national historic landmark where activists were beaten on what is now known as Bloody Sunday. The, the 54-mile stretch of road that protestors marched down in March 1965. Thehas an exhibit that details the challenges and violence faced by the protestors during the time of the marches, and thecovers the struggle for free and fair elections that inspired the marches. Like Montgomery and Selma, Birmingham’s civil rights legacy is as significant as it is tragic. Located within the six blocks of the Birmingham Civil Rights District, thewas the site of one of the saddest and most despicable tragedies of the civil rights movement. In September 1963 four Klansmen bombed the church, killing four girls aged 11 to 14—Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—and injuring over a dozen others. Today you can tour the historic church, which was the first Black church in Birmingham in the 19th century, and pay your respects at the Welsh Window, a stained-glass memorial to the victims installed in 1965., where civil rights activists often met in the ‘50s and ‘60s. During a May 1963 protest made up largely of students and children, authorities unleashed both fire hoses and dogs against the young activists, a shocking image that helped spread awareness of and sympathy for the civil rights movement. Today the park is home to a collection of sculptures that pay tribute to civil rights leaders and depict the violence inflicted upon protestors. Among the statues is Elizabeth MacQueen’s, which memorializes the four young girls who lost their lives at the nearby church. The sculpture garden at Kelly Ingram Park is a stark and sobering look into what the people of Birmingham had to endure to earn what they were already legally and morally entitled to.. Established in 1992, the museum looks back on the city’s civil rights history, focusing not just on the activism and turmoil of the ‘50s and ‘60s, but also what daily life under segregation was like. It also has a large archive of documents from the era, and hosts an Oral History Project that lets the people who lived the struggle discuss it in their own words. It’s simply one of the best and most informative civil rights museums in the country. Memphis is a crucial hotbed of Black culture in America, and one of the most important cities in the history of American music. You can immerse yourself in that history at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music or on, where you’ll also find echoes of an important chapter in civil rights history. The Memphis sanitation strike of 1968 saw over 1,300 Black sanitation workers go on strike for better pay and safer conditions, and Beale Street was one of the sites of their protests. That strike brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, where he gave one of his most famous speeches, commonly known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, on April 3, 1968. It was the last speech he would ever give. The next day King was assassinated outside his room at the Lorraine Motel. Today the Lorraine makes up the core of the, which is devoted not just to the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s but to the long fight for equality that stretches back to the earliest days of slavery in the American colonies. The museum brings that struggle to life in a comprehensive overview of America’s civil rights history, while letting guests reflect on the life and loss of that movement’s greatest leader on the site where he was murdered. Before leaving Memphis, head to the Clayborn Temple, which the striking sanitation workers made their headquarters in 1968, and gaze on. That rallying cry and motto for the sanitation workers in 1968 is recreated in huge letters, with the names of the workers engraved upon them. It’s a reminder that, as tragic as the passing of one man was, the movement in Memphis and elsewhere was always bigger than any single individual.Since 2011 a 30 foot figure of Martin Luther King has gazed out at the Tidal Basin on the National Mall, materializing from a solid chunk of granite just steps away from where he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. With its size and stature theis a fitting tribute to the man’s legacy, but it leaves unsaid the depths of the struggle that faced everybody who protested for civil rights alongside him. For a more informative look at the civil rights movement, and how it’s impacted America since King’s assassination in 1968, head to the, which is part of the Smithsonian. Civil rights is just one part of its focus—it aims to sum up nothing short of the entire African-American experience since Africans were first brought here in bondage—but you can learn about the fight for equality in the Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom exhibit, which examines Black history from the end of Reconstruction to King’s assassination, and see what has become of the movement over the last 50 years in the exhibit A Changing America. The museum also has a sizable collection of documents from the civil rights era in its archives, if you’re up for some research. Of course there’s far more to America’s civil rights history than what happened in these six cities, from the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, to Neil Humphrey’s “wade-ins” on the beaches of Sarasota. If you live in a Southern state, you are within a reasonable drive of a crucial bit of civil rights history. It’s our obligation to remember the past in hopes of making a better future, and there’s no better time to learn about this enduring fight for justice than today. For a far more detailed list of historical sites from the civil rights movement, visit the website for the
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