Rosa Parks wasn't the first Black woman arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery - Claudette Colvin preceded her by nine months. But Parks, a respected NAACP secretary, became the case around which organizers built their challenge. The Women's Political Council distributed 35,000 flyers calling for a boycott; the city's Black community, 40,000 people, found alternative transportation for over a year. King, a 26-year-old pastor new to Montgomery, emerged as spokesperson. His house was bombed; he was arrested; he discovered his calling. The Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional in November 1956. The boycott ended in December, and the movement had found its voice. The Rosa Parks Library and Museum downtown preserves the Cleveland Avenue bus stop and tells the story.

Montgomery served as the Confederacy's first capital from February to May 1861, before the government moved to Richmond. The Alabama State Capitol, where secession delegates met and Davis took office, still stands on Goat Hill - the same building where George Wallace would later proclaim 'segregation forever' in 1963. The First White House of the Confederacy, where Davis lived briefly, is preserved as a museum with period furnishings. Montgomery's role as both Confederate birthplace and civil rights battleground creates uncomfortable proximity: Dexter Avenue runs from the Capitol to King's church, the same route marchers from Selma would walk in 1965.

On March 25, 1965, 25,000 marchers arrived at the Alabama Capitol after walking 54 miles from Selma. They had started twice before - turned back by tear gas and billy clubs on 'Bloody Sunday,' then halted by federal court order on the second attempt. King led the final march, protected by federalized National Guard troops. Rosa Parks was there; so were celebrities, clergy, and ordinary citizens who had joined along the route. The Voting Rights Act passed five months later. The National Voting Rights Museum in Selma and the interpretive centers along the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail preserve the march's memory; the route itself, US Highway 80, is now a National Scenic Byway.

The Equal Justice Initiative opened two sites in Montgomery in 2018 that changed how America remembers racial terror. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice - the nation's first memorial to victims of lynching - displays 800 steel monuments, one for each county where lynchings occurred, hanging from above like bodies from trees. Over 4,400 names are inscribed. The Legacy Museum, in a building where enslaved people were once warehoused, traces the line from slavery through lynching to mass incarceration. The exhibits are devastating; the gift shop sells books about reckoning. Together they've drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to Montgomery to witness what America long refused to acknowledge.

Montgomery Regional Airport (MGM) offers connections to major hubs; Birmingham-Shuttlesworth (90 miles north) provides more options. I-65 runs through town, connecting to Birmingham and Mobile; I-85 leads to Atlanta. The Alabama River bends around downtown; Riverfront Park and the Harriott II riverboat offer water access. Montgomery is the anchor of Alabama's River Heritage region, the commercial center for the Black Belt's agricultural counties. From altitude, Montgomery appears as development spreading from the river bend - the Capitol dome visible on Goat Hill, the stadiums of Alabama State University and the minor league Biscuits marking the landscape. What appears from the air as Alabama's second-largest city is where the Confederacy was born, where Rosa Parks refused to stand, and where America's reckoning with racial history continues.