"But for Birmingham, we wouldn't be here."

Said John F. Kennedy, during a meeting in the summer of 1963 to discuss what would become the Civil Rights Act.  Having spent the past couple of days visiting some significant places in the history of that civil rights movement, many of which are captured on Maya Lin's Civil Rights Memorial, which we visited as soon as we arrived in Montgomery this evening, I can't help but feel that Kennedy was right - in more ways that one. 

In Jackson, Mississippi, we visited the humble home of Medgar Evers, still preserved just as it was when he was assassinated in his driveway in June of 1963.

Before leaving Mississippi for Alabama, we also drove through Eudora Welty's neighborhood and looked at some of the lovely homes in the Belhaven area.  Welty lived in this house (built by her parents) for her entire life, and wrote all of her books in her second floor bedroom, which overlooks Belhaven University, a small Christian college that is so pretty Maddie momentarily considered abdicating her atheism.

We arrived in Birmingham by the late afternoon, checking into the Tutwiler, a historic hotel, with time for a brief drive around, a fun dinner at an Alabama barbeque joint, and an audio tour of the historic photograph collection in the Tutwiler lobby.

 Today we walked part of the famous march that got Martin Luther King, Jr. arrested (and led to his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" - click on the link for an excerpt of this very long essay, one of my favorite of all time) and spent a couple of hours exploring the Civil Rights Institute, an amazing museum that brings to life the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the whole philosophy of nonviolence behind the civil disobedience practiced by so many brave men and women. 
As we walked through Kelly Ingram Park, the park where student protesters poured out of the 16th Street Baptist Park to begin their march to City Hall, I was overwhelmed by what they had gone through.  Standing in the shadow of the church where four little girls were killed due to a bombing by a white supremacist (at one point there were so many such bombings that Birmingham earned the nickname "Bombingham"), and walking on the same sidewalks where these high school aged students had joined the march in order to invigorate it, was amazing.  As we stopped to photograph one of the historical markers on the sidewalk, a middle aged black woman stopped to say hello.  We happened to be reading about the "Children's Crusade," where those high school students were recruited to join the cause.  She told us that she had been one of those children. 

Needless to say, our lunch conversation today was spirited and meaningful, with the kids wondering whether the fight for gay rights today can be compared to the struggle for civil rights, and all of us reflecting on what we would like to think we would have done had we had the opportunity to be a freedom rider, or to work to help to end the Jim Crow laws in the south. 

Because it can't all be about serious history lessons, we did stop by the oldest baseball stadium in America before we hit the road to Montgomery.  Called  Rickwood Field (after the son who spurned his father's steel business to run a baseball team instead), it is a great old baseball field, where we could run around and play every position and Dana could quote Field of Dreams to his heart's content (and boy did he!)  If you build it, they will come, indeed.

And that brings us to Montgomery, where we will spend the morning before heading to Monroeville, Alabama, home of Harper Lee and Truman Capote (and, because Dad might be interested, Mark Childress), and the inspiration for Maycomb, the fictional town at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird.  We will settle down tonight in our own state capital (it seems only right after having visited the state capitals of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama!)  I'll leave you with what I hope are a couple of artistic shots of the Civil Rights Memorial.  I'll take some more in broad daylight tomorrow.