MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Fred Gray, an Alabama attorney, knows more than most people about the Civil Rights Movement. After all, he was there when it started.
“Most of the Civil Rights Movement you can trace back to what we started on December 5, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama,” the 93-year-old Gray told more than 100 guests at the U.S. Civil Rights Trail Connectivity Pilgrimage in Montgomery.
Gray served as the attorney for Rosa Parks, whose resistance to segregation inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December 1955 and led to a series of Civil Rights victories over the next decade. He would go on to represent Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis and many other notable leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. And he was the special guest speaker for the dinner banquet during the Connectivity Pilgrimage, October 8–9 in Montgomery and nearby Selma.
Organized by leaders of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail Marketing Alliance, the event showcased the numerous immersive visitor experiences in Selma and Montgomery that tell the stories of the momentous events that took place in those communities during the Civil Rights Movement. The pilgrimage was attended by many attraction representatives and destination marketers in other communities that have sites enshrined on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail.
The idea was sparked by a similar, albeit smaller, trip that took place in 2023.
“A little over a year ago, Alabama hosted many of the board members and state travel directors,” said Mark Ezell, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Tourism and chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail Marketing Alliance. “They invited us to come and see how Montgomery is working on making Civil Rights such an immersive experience for this community and provided best practices so we could learn from them. We were so moved by the stories and the people and felt we should come back and bring our friends from the 15 [U.S. Civil Rights Trail] sites in Tennessee.”
The effort soon grew beyond Tennessee to include a delegation of nearly 100 representatives from eight states. Among attendees were state travel commissioners, destination marketers, academics and researchers, political leaders, historic site curators, and philanthropists with an interest in boosting the visibility of the Civil Rights story.
Attendees toured many of the historic sites, churches and museums in Selma and Montgomery that were sites of pivotal Civil Rights actions. Along the way they met luminaries like Gray and others, who told personal stories of their experiences during the Civil Rights Movement.
The tour began in Selma, where the group met with Jo Ann Bland, a historian and guide. She shared the story of how as a child, she and several hundred other protestors were violently attacked while trying to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what became known as the “Bloody Sunday” attack of 1965. Next, the group took a ceremonial walk across the bridge, singing much of the way, before driving along the route of the Selma to Montgomery March that ended at the steps of the Alabama Capitol.
Other highlights of the tour included a visit to the Rosa Parks Museum; a recreated mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church with a Martin Luther King, Jr., re-enactor; a tour of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where King pastored; and visits to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park and the Legacy Museum.
The agenda proved meaningful for many of the attendees.
“It’s just deeply moving — powerful, hard, victorious, sad,” Ezell said. “Our group has already cried and been moved, then angered, then motivated, then inspired — all of the emotions. But I’m just so thankful that Alabama did something so unprecedented and special. They said ‘Come, and we’ll show you everything we know. We’ll teach you.’ Because to me, that’s the power of the Civil Rights Movement. We are going home with a bigger vision of what things can look like.”
