Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage to Alabama.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge became a symbol of the momentous changes taking place in Alabama, America, and the world. It was here that voting rights marchers were violently confronted by law enforcement personnel on March 7, 1965. The day became known as Bloody Sunday. The march resumed on Sunday, March 21, with court protection through Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., who weighed the right of mobility against the right to march and ruled in favor of the demonstrators. This time, 3,200 marchers versus the initial 600 headed east out of Selma, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and on to Montgomery. Marchers walked 12 miles a day and slept in fields. By the time they reached the state capitol on Thursday, March 25, they were 25,000-strong. Less than five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Edmund Pettus Bridge carries U.S. Route 80 Business (US 80 Bus.) across the Alabama River in Selma, Alabama. Built in 1940, the bridge is named after Edmund Winston Pettus, a former Confederate brigadier general and U.S. Senator. On February 27, 2013, the bridge was declared a National Historic Landmark.

This narrative museum uses interactive media, sculpture, videography and exhibits to immerse visitors in the sights and sounds of the domestic slave trade, racial terrorism, the Jim Crow South, and the world’s largest prison system. As a physical site and an outreach program, the Legacy Museum is an engine for education about the legacy of racial inequality and for the truth and reconciliation that leads to real solutions to contemporary problems. Founded by Montgomery’s Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the Legacy Museum opened in April 26, 2018. Located on the site of a former warehouse where black people were enslaved the 11,000 square foot building is only a block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America, and steps away from an Alabama River dock and rail station where tens of thousands of enslaved black people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade.

Completed in 1933 and primarily used as a courthouse of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. The courthouse was the site of many landmark civil rights rulings by Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. that helped end segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South. In 1992, the United States Congress renamed the courthouse in honor of Frank Minis Johnson. In 2015 the courthouse was designated a National Historic Landmark. Today the Frank M. Johnson, Jr. U.S. Courthouse Complex also houses several different organizations. Occupants include Probation, U.S. Marshal services, Eleventh Circuit sitting judges, a U.S. Senator, and the offices of the Government Services Agency (GSA) that maintain this facility.

Built in 1926, Historic Bethel Baptist Church, Collegeville, became the epicenter for a non- violent protest movement that swept across the United States and around the world. Under the leadership of Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Bethel became the official launching pad of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. Bethel Baptist was also a key location during the 1961 Freedom Rides and was the designated point of contact for the group in Alabama. The church and its parsonage were bombed three times during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, including Christmas Day, 1956. On April 5, 2005, Historic Bethel was recognized as a National Historic Landmark. In 2009, Bethel was nominated by the National Park Service to UNESCO for recognition as a World Heritage Site.

The historic Kress building in Birmingham, AL, was built in 1937 as a department store. In the spring of 1963, activists in Birmingham launched one of the most influential campaigns of the Civil Rights movement. Project C, better known as the Birmingham Campaign, began with a series of lunch counter sit-ins at the Kress building, marches on city hall, and boycotts on downtown merchants to protest segregation.

Built in 1856, the Lowndes County Courthouse in Hayneville, Alabama, is the oldest continuously operating courthouse in Alabama and represents a legal system that tolerated generations of racial terror and injustice. In March 1888, a Black man named Theo Calloway was accused of killing a white man. Hours before he was scheduled to appear in court to stand trial, a mob of 200 white men abducted him from jail, hung him from a tree on the courthouse lawn, and riddled his body with bullets. Inside the courthouse the most famous case in the court’s history was the 1965 trial of Collie D. Wilkins, accused slayer of Detroit Civil Rights worker Viola Liuzzo. Liuzzo was shot while traveling through rural Lowndes County during the Selma to Montgomery marches. After two well-publicized trials, Wilkins was acquitted.

The memorial site honors the memory of Jonathan Daniels, a white Episcopal seminarian who was murdered in 1965 while working with SNCC to register Black voters in Lowndes County. The site consists of the courthouse where Daniels was arrested, the jail where he and other activists were held, and the location where he was fatally shot while trying to protect 17-year-old Ruby Sales. Sales marched in the Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches and has become a human rights advocate. She is one of 50 Civil Rights leaders showcased by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

EJI’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park is the newest addition to the Legacy sites and just opened in early 2024. Overlooking the Alabama River, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park honors the lives and memories of the 10 million Black people who were enslaved in America and celebrates their courage and resilience. At this 17-acre site along the very river where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked, breathtaking art and original artifacts invite an immersive, interactive journey and provide a unique view into the lives of enslaved people. The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park features newly commissioned works by artists including Alison Saar and Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, alongside major sculptures from Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, and Kehinde Wiley. The National Monument to Freedom is the highlight of the experience. Standing 43 feet tall and over 150 feet long, the Monument honors all four million enslaved Black people who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War by memorializing more than 120,000 unique surnames documented at the time. Space for reflection, remembrance, and contemplation will mark the conclusion of the journey through Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.

The First Baptist Church (also known as the Brick-A-Day Church) on North Ripley Street in Montgomery, Alabama, is a historic landmark. Founded in downtown Montgomery in 1867 as one of the first black churches in the area, it provided an alternative to the second-class treatment and discrimination African Americans faced at the other First Baptist Church in the city. In the first few decades after its establishment the First Baptist Church became one of the largest black churches in the South, growing from hundreds of parishioners to thousands. A hundred years later, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was an important gathering place for activities related to the civil rights movement and became associated with the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides of May 1961. The church was listed by the Alabama Historical Commission on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage on May 5, 2000.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was organized as the First Colored Baptist Church of Birmingham in 1873. It was the first black church to organize in Birmingham, which was founded just two years before. The present building, designed by the prominent black architect Wallace Rayfield, was constructed in 1911 by the local black contractor T.C. Windham. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the church served as an organizational headquarters, site of mass meetings and rallying point for African Americans protesting widespread institutionalized racism in Birmingham, Alabama and the South. The reverends Fred Shuttlesworth, who was the chief local organizer, James Bevel, SCLC leader who initiated the Children’s Crusade and taught the students nonviolence, and Martin Luther King, Jr. were frequent speakers at the church and led the movement. On Sunday, September 15, 1963, Thomas Blanton, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Robert Edward Chambliss, members of the Ku Klux Klan, planted 19 sticks of dynamite outside the basement of the church. At 10:22 a.m., they exploded, killing four young girls – Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair – and injuring 22 others. They were there preparing for the church’s “Youth Day.” This was one of a string of more than 45 bombings within the decade. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church increased Federal involvement in Alabama. President Johnson passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act the following year; and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed, making literacy tests and poll taxes illegal. The church was added to the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage on June 16, 1976, and to the National Register of Historic places on September 17, 1980 and was officially designated a National Historic Landmark on February 20, 2006 by the United States Department of the Interior.

Established by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a national memorial to commemorate the victims of lynching in the United States and aims to acknowledge past racial terrorism and advocate for social justice in America. Bryan Stevenson, the founder of EJI, was inspired by the examples of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany, and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, to create the Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial was conceived with the hope of creating a sober, meaningful site where people can gather and reflect on America’s history of racial inequality. Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize housands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) is an interpretive museum, gallery and research center that depicts the struggles of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibitions construct a self-guided journey through the struggles of the activists within the Movement, using their lessons of the past as a source of hope and positive change for the future. The Institute’s archives collect and preserve civil rights artifacts and documents, making it a national resource for civil rights movement research. The Institute opened in 1992 and is located in the Civil Rights District, which includes the historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park, Fourth Avenue Business District, and the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame located in the Carver Theatre.

Nineteenth century Montgomery physician J. Marion Sims is often credited as the father of modern gynecology for developing new tools and techniques for women’s health that are still used today. Often overlooked are the enslaved Black women he experimented on – without consent or anesthesia – to make those advancements. A new monument unveiled Friday in Montgomery aims to tell the other side of the Sims story by honoring the “Mothers of Gynecology,” – Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, three of eleven enslaved women who were the unwilling subjects of Sims’ experiments in the 1840s. The statues stand almost 15 feet high and were welded together by Montgomery artist and activist Michelle Browder. Browder said she made the Mothers statues from common metal items that were donated for the project, including tools, bicycle parts, and surgical and gynecological instruments

This marker honoring murdered civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo is located on U.S. Highway 80, about 20 miles east of Selma, Alabama. The marker is at the site where she was shot and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan on March 25, 1965, after the Selma to Montgomery March. Mrs. Liuzzo was the only white woman murdered in the movement. The memorial is one of several on the National Park Service’s Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail.

The Wilcox County community of Gee’s Bend, a rural community is tucked into a bend in the Alabama River known for cotton farming and a long tradition of creating quilts, now celebrated around the world as artistic masterpieces. In an attempt to make it more difficult for African American residents to travel to the county seat of Camden to register vote, the decades-old ferry serving as Gee’s Bend’s economic and social lifeline, was cancelled. Access was cut to services including commerce, health care, employment and registering and voting. It took nearly four decades to restore ferry service taken from the community. Dr. King traveled to Gee’s Bend to urge community members – many descended from enslaved people – to join the voting rights marches and register to vote. Many residents were jailed for responding to the call. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 two farmer mules from Gee’s Bend were chosen to pull his caisson. For more than a century, the people of Gee’s Bend worked to overcome poverty, prejudice and isolation. Yet, they endured. They symbolize the perseverance, pride and lesser-known civil rights contributions made by people in the Alabama communities we visit and experiences we share.

The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery is one of the most recognized churches in the world, known primarily for its years in the forefront of the civil rights movement led by then-pastor Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the church during the crucial early days of the civil rights movement, including through the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Most of the activities of the Montgomery Bus Boycott were directed from the church’s basement by King. King’s activism was evident from the beginning. He insisted that all of the members at the church become registered voters and join the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Located at 410 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Selma, Alabama, Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first AME church in the state. This church was a starting point for the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 and, as the meeting place and offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the Selma Movement. Brown Chapel AME, was the site of preparations for the march to Montgomery on March 7, 1965 and served as a refuge for injured marchers. On Sunday morning (known as Bloody Sunday) March 7, 1965, despite a ban on protest marches by Governor George Wallace, about 600 black protestors gathered outside Brown Chapel to march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. On December 7, 1997 Brown Chapel AME was declared a National Historic Landmark. The church is still in use today.

The Freedom Rides Museum is located in the Montgomery Greyhound bus station where Freedom Riders were attacked by a mob of angry white men in May 1961. The building was a bus station until 1995 and opened in 2011 as a museum. That same year the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Located beside the 16th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama, Kelly Ingram Park served as a central gathering place for demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement. It was in the park in early May of 1963 when Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered mass arrests of the student demonstrators. Images from these arrests were broadcasted all over the country, bringing the racial tensions of Birmingham to national attention. The park was rededicated as “A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation” in 1992 to coincide with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s opening.

Located in Montgomery, Alabama, the Civil Rights Memorial is a circular black granite table that honors the achievements and people of the Movement with engravings that chronicle major events and the names of those who died in the fight for equality. Water flows from the table’s center over the engravings to symbolically correspond to Dr. Marti Luther King, Jr.’s words engraved on the wall behind the table: “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”