Carolinas, Georgia & South Trips (Lonely Planet, 1st Edition) - Alex Leviton [15]
Out of Montgomery, take Hwy 80 (west bound) towards Selma – you are now traveling the path of one of the Civil Rights movement’s darkest hours, the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail. As you near Selma, stop at the Lowndes County Interpretive Center, which commemorates the 1965 Voting Rights March, and “Bloody Sunday” – the day Alabama State troopers greeted over 500 non-violent marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas. The whole thing was captured on video, marking one of the first time Americans outside the South had witnessed firsthand the horrifying images of the struggle. Shock and outrage ensued, and support for the movement grew. You can see it all here in a 25-minute documentary.
For supreme views of the bridge and river, book a room in the historic St James Hotel in Selma itself, where balconies stare right into the heart of this infamously bloodied battlefield. It’s not far from where the small National Voting Rights Museum is located, ironically enough in a building formerly occupied by the White Citizen’s Council, a now-defunct white supremacy group. The most shocking thing here is a cattle prod belonging to a defiantly racist local sheriff named Jim Clark, used routinely on African Americans.
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GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Martin Luther King, Jr is the most famous casualty of the Civil Rights movement in the US, but he was hardly a unique case. The following also lost their lives:
• Lamar Smith: Shot dead on a courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi.
• Viola Gregg Liuzzo: White housewife murdered in Selma for offering rides back to Montgomery to marchers from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
• Emmet Louis Till: 14-year-old murdered in Money, Mississippi, for flirting with a white girl.
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Head west out of Selma on Hwy 80 to Hwy 45 (north bound) through Tupelo, Mississippi to catch Hwy 78 (west bound) to Memphis and check into the Inn at Hunt Phelan – you’ve come a long way and deserve a little pampering, antebellum-style in this 1828 mansion on 5 acres, 1 mile northeast from civil rights central. It was here that MLK, Jr’s crusade was abruptly halted in April 1968, when he visited in support of the black sanitation workers. The visit was tense, as violence had erupted on MLK, Jr’s previous visit to town for the same reason, and MLK, Jr’s entourage noticed he was more nervous than usual. On April 3, MLK, Jr delivered the following lines in a speech at the Mason Temple: “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.”
The next day, while standing on the balcony outside room 306 at the Lorraine Motel on the south end of downtown Memphis, a shot rang out that took off half of MLK, Jr’s neck and jaw. He collapsed, one foot hanging off the railing, and died. Two months later, James Earl Ray was captured at London’s Heathrow Airport (on the same day that Senator Robert Kennedy, who was also assassinated, was laid to rest) and later convicted of MLK, Jr’s murder. Ray’s participation in the assassination, however, is debated and doubted to this day, especially by the King family. Ray died in prison in 1998. Both the Lorraine Motel and the boarding house from where the shot was allegedly fired are now part of the National Civil Rights Museum. Memphis’ oldest café, Arcade Restaurant, is a block away on S Main St. Munch here – as