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Trail to freedom

Southern Living, Oct 2003 by Latham, Tanner C

From Selma to Birmingham, explore the compelling landmarks of the Civil Rights Movement, and be inspired by the heroes who led the way.

This trail is full of the voices of those who were there. At once they are both haunting and inspirational, frightened and brave. Sometimes they are audible-a crackly clip of a spiritual or a firsthand account of a protest. Mostly, though, I don't hear the voices as much as I feel them. They resonate through the handwritten notes, black-and-white photographs, and fingerprints left on a memorial's granite face. All of these I find on the Civil Rights Trail, a trail I follow because I was not there. I was born more than 20 years after Rosa Parks kept her seat.

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Winding through Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, places once nationally recognized as hotbeds of racial tension and violence, the trail today celebrates each city's heritage. Here, courageous people of all colors forged ahead to make color a nonissue.

Birmingham: The World Still Watches

Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth's dark suit starkly contrasts with the white, lifesize plaster figures in the "Processional Gallery," an exhibit at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. He appears to be marching with them as he walks through, and while an audio track plays hymns, he listens. "We sang songs just like those to get us ready to face the dogs and the fire hoses," he says. His smile, more from a sense of victory than a fondness of memories, softens the two arched brows hovering above his fiery brown eyes. "You know, God must have had something in mind for me to do, because he sustained me through so very much," he says. "After everything we went through-all the threats, all the achievements-I now know what real faith is." Though the tone is tender, Reverend Shuttlesworth's voice still carries the rhythmic power it did more than 40 years ago when he first earned the moniker, "The Man Who Shook Up Birmingham." The story of his leadership here in the 1960s-told through photographs, informational plaques, and sound bites-is only one of the hundreds shared at the institute.

This is the perfect place to begin the trail. For one, it anchors a section of downtown Birmingham that also includes Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park, headquarters for rallies and mass meetings in the early sixties. But the main reason to start here is that the hightech and well-presented exhibits do so much to offer a concise overview of the Movement.

I walk past two water fountains, one labeled "whites" and the other "colored." I stare into the photographs of wide-eyed marchers, their mouths open and fingers clenching signs. I stop in a miniature theater and watch Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., just below Lincoln's feet at the Lincoln Memorial, deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech. In surround sound, his cadence, as indelible in my mind as anything I know, pushes up goose bumps on my arms.

"Through the establishment of the institute, we are saying we no longer hide from our history," says Odessa Woolfolk, president emerita of the institute. She stands by a wall spraypainted with the bloodred words, "Birmingham: The World is Watching." The wall introduces the documentary of the same name, which covers the city in 1963, a year when Birmingham's national identity was shaped by images of dogs, fire hoses, and broken glass. This directs me to a stained-glass window from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church now on display at the institute. Its gnarled framework tells a story all its own. Panes were removed from this window to repair the others damaged by the blast at the church; the explosion killed four girls. From where I stand, I see the church directly across the street and decide to go there next.

Sitting in a pew in the sanctuary of Sixteenth Street Baptist, I can almost hear the fervent messages flying from the pulpit. I pause at the stained-glass window given to the church by the people of Wales after the bombing and contemplate the far-reaching impact of the Civil Rights struggle.

I walk down the church's front steps and into Kelly Ingram Park, framed by the Birmingham skyline. A statue of Reverend King towers above the entrance, welcoming sojourners to a path called the Freedom Walk. Along this walkway, blue-gray metal sculptures rise from the green grass, depicting scenes and impressions from the Movement. I thoughtfully finger the animals' sharp teeth in Police Dog Attack and grasp the jail bars in The Children's March. The faces of the visitors I pass are stoic. Here, the past appears frozen in sculptures while the present moves and grows around us.

"We recognize that we were once a city that housed two people, black and white, unknown to one another except through the long, painful thread of segregation," says Ms. Woolfolk. "Now, we are a different city, embracing our past and using it as a guidepost to the future."

Selma: Marching On

"We came from everywhere. We locked arms and marched. We saw the school called Hope with smiling little faces. On rounding the corner and seeing the capitol, we cheered. We heard a great voice speaking to us, urging us on." Of the hundreds of slips of paper haphazardly plastering the National Voting Rights Museum & Institute's "I Was There Wall," this message by William P. Gregory catches my eye. If there was ever a place for voices on the trail, it is here. I imagine the hands scribbling their one- or two-sentence stories.

Trail to freedom

Southern Living, Oct 2003 by Latham, Tanner C

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