Montgomery, Alabama

By the time we were done with breakfast, the ghost town had transformed into a reasonably populated civic center. I wouldn't quite call it bustling, but we did pass other people on the sidewalk from time to time. The desk clerk had warned us that Dexter Avenue, up toward the capitol building, was in disrepair. Dilapidated. Apparently the last part of the center to benefit from the city's downtown revitalization campaign. "He's obviously never been to San Francisco," I said to my mom as we walked along it looking for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. "No," my mom said, "you wouldn't call this dilapidated in San Francisco. This seems like a normal, slightly run down city street."

We followed it until we found the church, which was closed on Mondays. Our luck. We went on instead to the Civil Rights Memorial Center around the corner. The Memorial Center is part of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a major player in the ongoing struggle for equality in the US. Lawyers, activists and administrators of the SPLC have been threatened with violence over the years, and the facility itself has been bombed by people who are unhappy about its work. We noticed an armed guard standing patrol across the street.

The Memorial Center was a perfect first stop on our Civil Rights pilgrimage and road trip. The visit provided an overview of the places we would visit over the next ten days and many of the individuals we would hear about. Most of the other museums and interpretive centers we visited presented the movement from the perspective of a specific incident or individual. Many of them were absolute gems, highly experiential interpretive centers created to memorialize things that happened where they happened, and often by people who were there. The curators of these small labors of love have put together powerful, focused displays, each one unique right down to the items in the gift shop. Every one we went to was fascinating, but it was also good to get an overview at the start to put it all into perspective.

On our second day in Montgomery we were able to explore Martin Luther King Jr.'s small church on Dexter Avenue, the tiny office where he wrote and thought with a view of the capitol building right out the window, the hall downstairs where members of the Montgomery Improvement Association met to plan the bus boycott of 1955. The lady who gave us our tour was nice enough to let us linger alone in the church for a while afterwards. Standing at the pulpit where King spoke some of his most passionate words, I tried to imagine the thoughts that must have come to his mind in that very place as he began to realize the magnitude of what was at stake and his own role in history.

After the church, we spent the rest of the afternoon at the Parsonage a few blocks away, first for a tour of the home where King and his family lived from 1954 to 1960, then for a long, informal chat with tour director Shirley Cherry. By the time we left it was hugs all around. We were running late but still managed to squeak into the Rosa Parks Museum before it closed, followed by a much-needed rest back at the hotel.

This was our second full night in Montgomery. The first night we'd gone to a holiday concert at the Montgomery Symphony, which was conveniently located across the street from our hotel. The second night I wanted to go to a Sing-Along Messiah I'd seen advertised on Dexter Avenue. My mom, not being much of a vocalist, decided to stay in. I left her at dinner having just ordered what we thought was a personal size pizza...