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The U.S. Civil Rights Trail Debuts

A Multiyear Effort

Work on the Civil Rights Trail began several years ago when Jonathan Jarvis, director of the National Park Service, encouraged American historians to begin cataloging the sites of important civil rights events throughout the country. Since many of those events took place in Alabama, Sentell and the Alabama Tourism Department took up the call and contacted faculty members at Georgia State University with expertise in civil rights history to help get the project started.

“After about six months, they came back and said they had found 60 major sites,” Sentell said. “Nobody had done an inventory of these civil rights landmarks. So I thought, let’s take this information and provide it to the Southern tourism directors and create a civil rights trail.”

The state tourism directors then identified another 40 lesser-known sites from their areas to include on the trail. Once the list was compiled, the trail was born, and organizers got to work producing a rack card and a website, www.civilrightstrail.com, that would introduce travelers to the stories found throughout these destinations.

The website went public over Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January and received immediate interest.

“We had 25,000 visitors to the site in the first 48 hours of being live, which is an exciting response,” Sentell said. “The listings for most of the major landmarks received between 1,000 and 2,000 page views.”

The news also garnered coverage in numerous major media outlets nationwide, and a documentary film featuring many of the major sites and stories from people involved in the events there began airing on television in February.

In addition to positive media coverage, trail organizers report great interest from the travel trade, both in the United States and abroad, with tour companies inquiring about planning new itineraries based on the trail.

“We rolled this out last fall at World Travel Market in London and had some great interest from operators there,” Langston said. “We’re seeing a number of operators putting tours together. They’re saying it’s something new and relevant right now. And the domestic audience can relate to the story even more than the international audience can.”

Given the current social and political climate in the United States, this trail highlighting the amazing stories of the civil rights movement is proving to be more than just a historical or tourism project.

“In the last six months, discussion about civil and human rights has ramped up substantially because of the political rhetoric in the country,” Sentell said. “It has made this topic much more relevant than we could have expected when we started this.”

Brian Jewell

Brian Jewell is the executive editor of The Group Travel Leader. In more than a decade of travel journalism he has visited 48 states and 25 foreign countries.