Footsteps of the Movement

Tracing the Civil Rights Struggle Across the American South

From the church where Martin Luther King Jr. was baptized to the motel balcony where he was killed, this tour follows the geography of the Civil Rights Movement across five Southern cities. Nine stops trace a decade of courage, violence, and transformation that redefined American democracy.

Itinerary

1. Where It Began — On Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, a boy was born into a family of preachers. The house still stands, the church still preaches, and the story of a movement still starts here.
2. The Seat She Kept — On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. What followed was not spontaneous -- it was a carefully planned act of resistance that launched a 381-day boycott and changed the nation.
3. The Young Pastor's Pulpit — A twenty-five-year-old pastor named King arrived at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954. Within a year, the Montgomery Bus Boycott made him the voice of a movement -- from a pulpit one block from the Alabama State Capitol.
4. The Nine Who Walked In — In September 1957, nine Black students walked through a howling mob to integrate Little Rock Central High School. It took the 101st Airborne Division to get them through the door -- and the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford facing the crowd became the face of a nation confronting itself.
5. Four Little Girls — On September 15, 1963, a bomb planted by Klansmen exploded beneath the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four girls in the basement. Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair -- aged eleven to fourteen -- were preparing for a sermon titled 'The Love That Forgives.'
6. Bloody Sunday — On March 7, 1965, six hundred marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma heading for Montgomery. On the far side, Alabama state troopers beat them with billy clubs and tear gas. The bridge -- named for a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader -- became the symbol of both racial terror and the courage that overcame it.
7. Room 306 — At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto the balcony of Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. A single rifle shot ended his life at thirty-nine. The motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum, and Room 306 is preserved exactly as it was that evening -- the bed unmade, the meal uneaten.
8. The Reckoning — Opened in 2018, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery confronts the full arc of racial terror in America -- from slavery through lynching to mass incarceration. Eight hundred steel columns hang from a roof, one for each county where a documented lynching occurred. It is the memorial the country avoided building for a century.