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By Root 570 0

rights historic site that has the most inspirational resonance for me is Ebenezer Baptist Church’s Heritage Sanctuary, where my father, uncle, grandfather and great grandfather all preached. There were civil rights meetings being held in Ebenezer even before my father was born. It is also the church I grew up in and where I developed a strong spiritual foundation. As a child, I always looked forward to getting dressed up and going to church on Sunday. Although on Sunday, June 30, 1974 my grandmother was assassinated while playing the Lord’s Prayer on the church organ by a deranged young man. So many of the other memories are joyful – weddings, baptisms, great singing and often laughter, as well as the inspirational sermons. I’m sure those precious memories contributed to me becoming a preacher. It was in Ebenezer’s Heritage Sanctuary where I first preached and was ordained into the gospel ministry. I have also preached on special occasions, like the 25th Commemorative Holiday Service honoring my father. It’s holy ground to me, and many others.“

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“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” he wrote. “Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was ‘well timed,’ according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’ We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

While in town, be sure you grab a meal at Café Dupont where wonderful upscale contemporary Southern cuisine emerges from the kitchen. The next stop is Montgomery, but if you want to sleep here (trust us, you do), try the Tutwiler Hotel, one of the city’s two historic choices. There is nothing anywhere near as appealing in Montgomery.

I-65 (south bound) out of Birmingham is a straight shot to Montgomery, the armpit of America otherwise, but ground zero for the Civil Rights movement. It was here that the movement found its footing in 1955, when a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) named Rosa Parks boarded a public bus and decided today wasn’t going to be the day she moved seats because of the color of her skin. When she refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger, all hell broke loose. Though Parks wasn’t the first to engage in this sort of civil disobedience, her actions and subsequent arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, (conceived by MLK, Jr) turning her into an icon of non-violent social change and paving the way for the entire Civil Rights movement.

It wasn’t until the city of Montgomery was hit in the pocketbook that change commenced (the year-long bus boycott by African Americans resulted in a massive revenue hole for the city’s public transit system as African Americans were its bread and butter). In 1956, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that Alabama’s racial segregation laws on public buses had run their course. A month later, the boycott ended, and the Civil Rights movement scored its first major victory. The bus ride itself is recreated at the Rosa Parks Museum, located in the former spot of the Empire Theater, in front of which Parks took her defiant stand. You can also take a photo next to a sculpture of Parks seated on the bus.

Nearby, the Civil Rights Memorial Center, with its circular memorial designed by Maya Lin, is a haunting eye-opener for anyone who only learned about the struggle for civil rights in eighth grade American History class. It focuses on 40 martyrs of the movement, all murdered for countless reasons; many of the murders have never been solved. MLK, Jr was the most famous, but there were many ‘faceless’ deaths along the way, white and black alike, that here provides the most somber moments while tracing the footsteps