Oak Mountain State Park; Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; 16th Street Baptist; Kelly Ingram Park; Drive into Mississippi; Tombigbee State Park
Now I received a perfectly adequate, above-average education through high school; this I freely admit. I knew the atrocities committed against the African Americans in the South, both through custom and the Jim Crow laws, and the rallying movement surrounding Civil Rights, featuring the beloved Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the Freedom Riders, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and the other nameless martyrs. I knew all about Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. the Board of Education, the grandfather clause, poll taxes, and literacy tests. I thought I knew all about it, when in fact I just knew names and facts—and that I recognize is a lot more than what others know.
But this, my friends, was an education. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is a fabulous resource and a testament to our slow and reluctant move towards confronting the truth of our past.To begin, the city of Birmingham had relegated the African Americans to a mere three blocks in each direction. Besides the expected extreme segregation in the South, first by custom then by the outrageously specific and paranoid (as well as humiliating) Jim Crow laws, were stark differences in economic opportunities, housing options, and employment opportunities. The African Americans labored next to the immigrants in manual labor, such as building railroads, and prison labor was frequent and taken for granted. And that was only the beginning.There were the bombings, the lynchings, the murders, the beatings, the riots, and the malice that permeated the South. These we have heard about.
Today Kelly Ingram Park is a peaceful, manicured, and unassuming patch of green in the middle of Birmingham. As we walked through it, we saw a young couple in scrubs giggling and flirting by its central fountain. Nothing about its initial appearance would suggest that it was the scene of some of the worst atrocities of police brutality and violent racism. If one did not already know it, one would never guess that upon that lush green grass, policemen turned high-powered hoses and bloodthirsty dogs on the demonstrating African Americans, attacking them relentlessly, reducing them to lumps on the ground. This was the place where the hard-hitting footage of such blatant inhumanity riled the national and international scene, placing pressure on the local and state governments. 
Across the street is the 16th Baptist Church—the site of a bombing that murdered four adolescent girls and the murders of two more young boys later that same day. Churches in the African American community in Birmingham of the 60s were much more than centers of worship; they were epicenters of everyday life, offering economic guidance, educational help, community support, and a rallying ground for the civil rights movement. Is it any wonder that the orators on the forefront were ministers and pastors? 
Like Kelly Ingram Park, the church is peaceful and innocent today, repaired and gentrified so that the only witness to the deaths is a simple bronze plaque by its side. 
Popeye's once more, where we met a handsome African American cop with whom we shared about New Day for Children. And then into Mississippi we careened!
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