Education Product – U.S. Civil Rights

The U.S. Civil Rights Trail is a collection of churches, courthouses, schools, museums and other landmarks, primarily in the Southern states, where activists challenged segregation in the 1950s and 1960s to advance social justice.

This one website highlights more than 100 locations across 14 states.   Sites in 8 Alabama cities are listed.  Complete with timeline, photo gallery,  and event highlights, the information is informative and we hope will call you to action to take students to many of the actual sites where history was made – especially those in Alabama. Sites such as the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma; 16th Street Bapitst Church and Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and other sites in Birmingham; Rosa Park’s Museum, Dexter Ave King Memorial Church, Dexter Parsonage Museum, Freedom Rides Museum, Alabama State Capitol Building and other sites in Montgomery, Selma-to-Montgomery National Park Interpretive Center and National Historic Trail, and the Tuskegee Airmen Mkuseum from the National Park Service in Tuskegee.

The website can be viewed at www.civilrghtstrail.com

The new Equal Justice Iniativce’s memorial and museums are powerful teaching tools on a diffeicult American subject. Both are located in downtown Montgomery, about a four minute drive from each other.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice:  This is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.

The Legacy Museum:  From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is situated on a site in Montgomery where enslaved people were once warehoused.  A block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America, the Legacy Museum is steps away from an Alabama dock and rail station where tens of thousands of black people were trafficked during the 19th century.

More informaiton can be found at https://museumandmemorial.eji.org