Historic Smorgasbord
Serving as Alabama’s capital city, Montgomery has a rich history spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. Groups can connect with numerous elements of Montgomery history by visiting various attractions around the city.
Across the street from the capitol, at the First White House of the Confederacy, groups can tour the home where Jefferson Davis and his family lived when Montgomery served as capital of the Confederacy during several months in 1861. On the campus of Troy University, the Rosa Parks Museum honors the hero of the Montgomery Bus Boycott who became a famous figure in the civil rights movement.
Old Alabama Town comprises six blocks of authentically restored 19th- and early-20th-century structures in downtown Montgomery. This historic village has log cabins, slave quarters, lavish antebellum mansions and other buildings. The organization offers groups a variety of interactive tours that detail how people lived and worked in Montgomery in the 1800s.
Remembering Selma
Part of the greater civil rights movement included a push for expanded voting rights for African-Americans, who had been largely disenfranchised in the South. In Selma, a city that saw a number of famous demonstrations, the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute tells the story of the struggle for suffrage equality.
Opened in 1993, the museum uses photography, video exhibits, documents, personal notes and other civil rights artifacts to illustrate the significance of the voting rights movement. Visitors learn about area civil rights leaders, “foot soldiers” who supported their efforts and the “Bloody Sunday” attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 that became a lightning rod in Selma’s history.
Visits to the National Voting Rights Museum can be packaged with visits to the nearby Slavery and Civil War Museum. The Footprints to Freedom Tour includes admission to both museums, a tour of the historic Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church and a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Civil Rights Hub
Few places were as instrumental in the civil rights movement of the 1960s as Birmingham, a city that saw some of the most important and tragic events of the time. Groups that visit Birmingham can engage with this element of its history in a variety of ways.
For a good overview of the movement in Alabama, visitors should start at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where murals and galleries highlight the conditions that Jim Crow laws created throughout the South. Exhibits show pairs of water fountains and school classrooms that were segregated, and demonstrate the disparate conditions and facilities available to the two races.
From there, groups can continue to the Civil Rights District, an area that includes public memorials at Clay Engels Park, where demonstrators were famously attacked with dogs and water cannons. A historic tour of the city should also include a stop at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, an African-American house of worship that was bombed in 1963 and became an icon of the civil rights movement.
