Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee

Atlanta Georgia

On this tour we talk about Georgia's history, Atlanta's history, from Slavery to the Civil War from Reconstruction and Segregation into the Civil Rights Movement, up into current history. We will tour the downtown historical neighborhood of Auburn Ave. The historic business and cultural district that shaped Dr. King. We'll walk and visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic District with Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. King and Coretta Scott King’s gravesite, Dr. Kings Birth Home and the National Parks Museum and visitors center. Later we'll drive by the Atlanta University Schools of Morehouse, Spelman, Clark-Atlanta U. and Morris Brown colleges. We will also drive by Paschal's Hotel and Restaurant, the primary meeting place for Civil Rights organizations and The King Family Home at the time of Dr. Kings assassination. The tour is all day staring at 8:00am and will include historical videos shown along the way. There be some walking at the MLK National Park and on Auburn Avenue. We will also be going to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights Museum as an attraction. All tours at the group hotel.

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 Parks refusal 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.

Tuskegee Alabama

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Tuskegee was part of a landmark voting rights case, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, which found the gerrymandering of districts to limit the African-American vote to be unconstitutional. Fun fact: did you know activist Rosa Parks, singer-songwriter Lionel Richie and television journalist Robin Roberts are from Tuskegee?

While in this city, take a rolling tour of key sites. Survey the Tuskegee History Center and the campus of Tuskegee University. It is the first Black college to be designated as a Registered National Historic Landmark (April 2, 1966), and the only Black college to be designated a National Historic Site (October 26, 1974).

The institution is the offspring of two American giants—Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.

Pause for a group photo at the statue Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, which depicts Booker T. Washington and is inscribed, "He lifted the veil of ignorance from his people and pointed the way to progress through education and industry."

Washington was born into slavery, and after emancipation, he overcame immense challenges to devote his life to promoting the advancement of African-Americans.

Washington recruited the best and the brightest to come and teach at Tuskegee, including George Washington Carver, the institute’s most celebrated professor. Carver, too, was born into slavery but became a prominent scientist and inventor.

Carver’s innovations in agriculture, especially with peanuts, were important in the South’s economic growth. Amazingly, he devised hundreds of uses for the peanut, including milk, plastics, paints, dyes, cosmetics, medicinal oils, soap, ink, and wood stains.

Many also do not know the true story of the Tuskegee Airmen. Start with Moton Field, the site of primary flight training for these pioneering World War II pilots.

Cadets trained in Stearman PT-17 biplanes, aircraft tough enough to withstand the rigors of learning. African-Americans trained here in a system set up for them to fail. The program had been created to prove these men didn't possess the physical and mental abilities to lead, fly military aircraft, or fight in war.

In the skies over Europe, however, this was heartily proved incorrect, and success paved the way for the integration of the U.S. military, federal government, and the nation overall. Gain insight into the challenges overcome and the accomplishments celebrated through stories of some of America's most important citizens.

Selma Alabama

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.

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 1964 and Civil Rights laws.

16th 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

Mississippi

Explore the movement that changed the nation. Discover stories of Mississippians like Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Vernon Dahmer, as well as those who traveled many miles to stand beside them, come what may, in the name of equal rights for all.

The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi is full of ordinary men and women who refused to sit silently while their brothers and sisters were denied their basic freedoms. A number of these heroes are featured throughout the museum as Points of Light, shining exemplars of dignity, strength, and perseverance in the face of oppression.

Emmett Till Lynched (Aug 1955)

Emmett Louis Till is a 14-year-old boy from Chicago. Over summer vacation, he and his cousin Curtis Jones visit relatives in Money Mississippi. He somehow offends the racial sensabilities of local whites — some of them claim he "whistled at" or "sassed" or "flirted" with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who runs a local store catering to Blacks.

On the night of August 28, a few days later, Carolyn Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam drag Till from his bed, savagely beat him, shoot him in the head, tie his corpse to a piece of heavy machinery with barbed wire, and dump his body in the nearby Tallahatchie River.

The Terror in Mississippi

NAACP Leader Rev. George Wesley Lee Murdered in Belzoni MS. (May 1955)

Rev. George Wesley Lee is an NAACP leader and one of the first Black men registered to vote in Humphreys County in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. He uses his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to vote. To the great consternation of the White Citizens Council and the KKK, he manages to get almost 100 Blacks registered. White officials offer Lee "protection" on the condition he remove his name from the list of registered voters and end his voter registration efforts. He refuses.

On May 7, 1955, Lee attempts to vote in the Democratic primary. Though he is a legally registered voter, he is prevented from casting his ballot because the Mississippi Democratic Party is "white-only." Only whites are allowed to vote in party primaries or participate in party meetings or activities.

The following year, just a few days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown decision, Lee was driving home from an RCNL meeting. A car pulled up beside him and someone inside shot him to death.

The Murder of Three Civil Rights Workers

Three Civil Rights workers killed in Mississippi summer 1964.

Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were two white men who worked with CORE, a group that encourage black Americans to register to vote and coach them on how to pass the voter registration exams. Along with James Cheney, the African-American from Mississippi.

They were heading south to Mississippi to investigate the burning of a church there. On Sunday night, June 21, 1964, the three men disappeared. A month and a half later the FBI discovered the three men’s bodies burned in a 15 foot deep earthen dam.

Three years later, on February 27, 1967, the Neshoba county sheriff and 18 others, (all were Klan members) and they were indicted for the murders. A two week federal trial in Meridian Mississippi, resulted in seven guilty verdicts and sentences ranging from 3 to 10 years.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in the workplace, in schools, and in public places.

Johnson’s main opponent was his longtime friend and mentor, Richard B. Russell, who told the Senate, we will resist to the bitter end, any measure, or any movement, which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling, and amalgamation of the races in our southern states.

Russell, then organized 18 Southern Democratic Senators in a filibuster during the Civil Rights Bill.

Tennessee

Memphis

Martin Luther King’s popularity waned as he shifted his focus to economic inequality, spoke out against the Vietnam War and a younger and more militant generation of black activists called for speedier changes in society, according to Garrow.

On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated by gunshot at the Lorraine Motel during a visit to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is considered one of the most prominent Civil Rights leaders in the entire world. Leading multiple famous demonstrations including the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the March on Washington, Dr. King focused on desegregation, the right to vote, labor rights, poverty and more. He famously utilized the principle of nonviolent protest first championed by Mahatma Gandhi, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Dr. King’s life came to a tragic end when-he was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. Ida B. Wells-Barnett House

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a Civil Rights advocate, journalist, and suffragist.She lived in this house from 1919 to 1929. Arguably, her most famous incident occurred in 1884 when Wells refused to sit in a segregated car on a train in Tennessee. She was forcibly removed and, after some time, was able to file a successful lawsuit in a lower court.

Explore the Historic Beale Street

Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, has long been a cultural crossroads—where bold rhythms, flavors, and voices shape the American South. With a legacy of more than 150 years in the making, this legendary street has served as a launchpad for musical innovation, a gathering place for all. Its past is rich, its present is vibrant, and its future remains rooted in the traditions that built it. Don’t forget to visit the many mouthwatering restaurants on Beale Street and hear the music that fills the iconic street.

STAX Museum of American Soul Music

 

It’s on the site of the former STAX Records

Studio located at College and McLemore from 1960 to 1975 when it was forced into bankruptcy.

t’s now a re-creation of the recording studios

It’s now home to an after school music program and a public charter school serving about 700 families.

Museum gets about 64,000 visitors each year.

Stax launched and supported the careers of artists such as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Sam & Dave, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Albert King, William Bell, Eddie Floyd, Jean Knight, Mable John, and countless others including spoken word and comedy by Rev. Jesse Jackson, Moms Mabley, and Richard Pryor.