Rosa Parks and African American Rights Tour

You’ll arrive in Montgomery, Alabama, the state’s capital and one of the most important cities in the civil rights movement.

Begin your day at the Rosa Parks arrest site. Take some time to feel the gravity of this place, where you’ll see Rosa Parks’s Bible in a locked case. Next, you’ll head to the Freedom Rides Museum. The Freedom Riders made history by using Parks’s arrest to challenge the practice of segregated travel throughout the South. You’ll learn more about their courage and determination at this stop.

Today, we’ll focus on Martin Luther King, Jr., an iconic civil rights leader and a household name. We’ll head to his church in Montgomery, the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. You’ll tour the church with an engaging tour guide who knows its history, after which you’ll visit the Dexter Parsonage Museum, where MLK lived when he was a pastor. After, enjoy a Southern-style dinner complete with barbeque and cornbread.

Today, you’ll spend some time at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum. This attraction includes a lifesize statue of Rosa Parks and a replica of the bus where she sat that day. Afterward, you’ll visit The Community Kitchens of Montgomery to help them with their food pantry. African-Americans are twice as likely as white people to experience hunger, so this is a tangible way to help the African American community.

After you eat some grits for breakfast, you’ll head to the Lowndes Interpretive Center, which commemorates the people who marched from Selma to Montgomery to help African-Americans fight voter suppression laws in the south. Then you’ll visit the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of preparations for the march to Montgomery. Finally, you’ll walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where activists marched against racial injustice, eventually resulting in the passage of the Voting Rights Act protecting the African-American vote.

Your first stop today is the Legacy Museum, which use its exhibits to immerse visitors in the realities of the past and present of racism in America. After your tour, a representative of the Equal Justice Initiative will give you some information about mass incarceration in the United States, how it harms African Americans disproportionately, and what you can do to make a difference. Lastly, head to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice located less than a mile away. This memorial is dedicated to African-Americans who have faced discrimination and racial violence, from the slave trade to police brutality.

Following your tour, you may feel overwhelmed with the amount of suffering African Americans have endured and continue to face. But one of the upsides is that the tour also taught you about how to help, and hopefully lit a fire under you to help make the world a better place.