Content Produced in Partnership with Deep South USA
In January 2018, a new American Civil Rights Trail was launched focusing on the key sites – many of them in the Deep South – where major events took place to promote and establish racial and social justice following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Those places range from schools and courthouses, churches and museums, even murder sites and memorials where activists challenged segregation, voting restrictions and other inequities in the 1950’s and 60’s.
Key among them were two sites in New Orleans, Louisiana. A sign outside the William Frantz Elementary School tells the dramatic story of how in November 1960 brave six-year-old Ruby Briggs challenged segregated schooling, faced hostile white mobs – and inspired many others to follow in her footsteps – by demanding the right to become the first non-white child to attend the school. The landmark case that supported this right and other anti-segregation cases was decided in the city’s Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
To the north in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana State Capitol, tallest such building in the USA, overlooked another dramatic event in 1967 when 600 protestors against racial injustice arrived here after a 10-day, 106-mile march. Protected by 2,000 National Guardsmen and policemen, their protect indicated that at last the federal government was prepared to enforce new Civil Right legislation.
In Berea, Kentucky, Berea College had long since (in 1855) set a positive example by educating “persons of good character” regardless of race, gender or class. And when first the Kentucky government, and then the U.S. Supreme Court, decreed that it must become racially segregated in the early 1900’s, it paid for the affected students to attend all-black colleges and then established an African-American vocational school near Louisville. And in 1965, 50 of its students joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the famous and perilous voting rights march from Selma to the Alabama state capital, Montgomery.
Louisville, located to the north-west overlooking the Ohio River, also has key places marked where non-violent protests took place again segregation in white-owned establishments and other social injustices. They led to the ouster of the segregationist mayor and city aldermen. Another key Civil Rights spot is just to the east of Louisville in the Simpsonville home of Whitney M. Young Jr. who dedicated his life to ending employment discrimination and promoting voter legislation. He became the president of the influential National Urban League and in 1968 was given a Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.
Another great African-American Civil Rights leader, Medgar Evers, is honoured with an historic signpost outside the modest Jackson, Mississippi home where he was assassinated by a member of the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. You can learn more about him and other African-American leaders in Jackson’s Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and discover the stories of a Mississippi movement that changed the world. The Museum opened in 2017 and is the only one of its kind in the state.
Racial viciousness is also recalled at Birmingham, Alabama‘s 16th Street Baptist Church where a bomb thrown by Ku Klux Klan members in 1963 killed four young black girls. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was also imprisoned in the city for his Civil Rights activities and more can be learned at Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
While pastor of what is now Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Dr. King sheltered Freedom Riders from white mobs and helped plan the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
That event was sparked by Rosa Parks when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a local bus. Thereafter local African-Americans refused to ride the buses for an entire year. Now there’s a local museum dedicated to Rosa and a memorial to those who lost their lives in the Civil Rights movement between 1954 and 1968.
But perhaps the most dramatic Alabama site is Selma’s river-spanning Edmund Pettus Bridge where in March 1965 peaceful right-to-vote marchers headed to the state capital in Montgomery were brutally attacked by police and vicious dogs. It was dramatically depicted in the outstanding 2014 film Selma.
Dr. King himself is particularly remembered and honoured in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was assassinated on April 4,1968, while in town to support striking black sanitation workers. You can visit the cordoned-off bedroom in the Lorraine Motel where he spent the night before moving on to the balcony where he was mowed down by sniper James Earl Ray, whose motivation and paymasters are speculated about to this day.
In the adjacent National Civil Rights Museum, you learn about such things as the voting rights Freedom Riders, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the student sit-ins at whites-only bus counters.
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