Atlanta Georgia

Atlanta is the city that rose from the ashes of the Civil War to become the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  

Atlanta was completely destroyed after General Sherman’s Union troops march through Georgia in 1864.  It was completely rebuilt in ten years after the war. The rebuilding of Atlanta was made possible with help of African Americans, the newly freed people that followed General Sherman’s troops into Atlanta. They pitched in and helped to rebuild the city. These ex-slaves eventually combined their talents with the newly educated Black population that attended one of the five Historically Black Colleges (HBCU’s).

In a segregated south they were able to prosper and build a storied community and street, that was named the “Richest Negro Street in the World”. 

Tour Highlights: The Martin Luther King National Historic District, the Atlanta University Schools and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.

Birmingham Alabama 1963

The Birmingham Campaign was a strategic movement organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the unequal treatment that black Americansendured in Birmingham, Alabama. 

The campaign ran during the spring of 1963, culminating in widely publicized confrontations between black youth and white civic authorities, that eventually pressured the municipal government to change the city's discrimination laws. 

Organizers, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. used nonviolent direct action tactics to defy laws they considered unfair. In the early 1960s, Birmingham was one of the most racially divided cities in the United States, as black citizens faced legal and economic disparities as well as violent retribution when they attempted to bring attention to their problems. 

Protests in Birmingham began with a boycott to pressure business leaders to provide employment opportunities to people of all races, and end segregation in public facilities, restaurants, and stores. When business leaders resisted the boycott, SCLC organizer Wyatt Tee Walker and Birmingham native Fred Shuttlesworth began what they termed Project C, a series of sit-ins and marches intended to provoke mass arrests. After the campaign ran low on adult volunteers, high school, college, and elementary students were trained by SCLC coordinator James Bevel to participate, resulting in hundreds of arrests and an instant intensification of national media attention on the campaign. 
To dissuade demonstrators and control the protests the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene "Bull" Connor, used high-pressure water jets and police dogs on children and bystanders. Media coverage of these events brought intense scrutiny on racial segregation in the South.

Birmingham Alabama

Kelly Ingram Park
The park, just outside the doors of the 16th Street Baptist Church, served as a central staging ground for large-scale demonstrations during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
It was here, during the first week of May 1963, that Birmingham police and firemen, under orders from Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, confronted demonstrators, many of them children, first with mass arrests and then with police dogs and firehoses. Images from those confrontations, broadcast nationwide, spurred a public outcry which turned the nation's attention to the struggle for racial equality. The demonstrations in Birmingham brought city leaders to agree to an end of public segregation. In addition, they helped ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964and Civil Rights laws.

16^th Street Baptist Church
During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church served as an organizational headquarters, site of mass meetings and rallying point for blacks protesting widespread institutionalized racism in Birmingham, Alabama and the South.
In September 1963, it was the target of the racially motivated 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four girls in the midst of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Tour Highlights: 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Kelly Ingram Park

Montgomery Alabama

Montgomery is now a must see location on the Civil Rights Tour
Montgomery Alabama is where the Modern Civil Rights Movement got its start when Rosa Parksrefusal to give up her seat on the city bus gave rise to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. 
Young Martin Luther King Jr. was the new Black Baptist minister in town and was chosen to lead the boycott. Montgomery is also where Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy was sworn in as president and where he later sent the orders to fire on Ft. Sumter, initiating the Civil War.

Tour Highlights:  Rosa Parks Museum, The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Greyhound Bus Station (Freedom Riders Bus Station), The Legacy Museum, National Center for Peace and Justice, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, National Civil Rights Memorial Center.

Selma Alabama 1965

The killing of a 26 year old African American male, Jimmie Lee Jackson, in Marion, AL, prompted the idea to march from Brown Chapel in Selma to the State Capitol in Montgomery, AL.

The Selma to Montgomery marches were three marches in 1965 that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement. They grew out of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, launched by local African-Americans who formed the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL). In 1963, the DCVL and organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC) began voter-registration work. 
When white resistance to Black voter registration proved intractable, the DCVL requested the assistance of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who brought many prominent civil rights and civic leaders to support voting rights.
The first march took place on March 7, 1965 — "Bloody Sunday" — when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas.