Visitors can literally walk in the footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, John Lewis and other African American activists, thanks to the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, which was launched in January on King's birthday.

 The U.S. Civil Rights Trail marks the first time Southern tourism departments have worked together to link the country's most important civil rights sites.  Many of these important historical sites are in Alabama.

The trail includes almost 130 museums, churches, courthouses and other landmarks that were essential to the advancement of social equality during the volatile 1950s and 1960s.  Almost 30 of these sites are in Alabama with most of them in Central Alabama.  Montgomery has 10.  Selma has seven, and Birmingham and Tuskegee have four. The website www.civilrightstrail.com profiles the landmarks and offers an interactive map, interviews with foot soldiers, past and present photographs and 360-degree video as special features.

Alabama tourism director Lee Sentell said civil rights sites are already popular attractions, and the U.S. Civil Rights Trail will only increase that popularity.

“The subject of human rights has never been more relevant,” he said. “The landmarks in Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery already attract visitors from Britain, Europe and Australia as well as from the U.S. Now that the South has a website that raises the visibility of minor sites, we can expect more tourists in Monroeville, Tuskegee and Scottsboro.”

By connecting these sites for the first time, it also makes it easier to plan multi-state road trips and to plan them around particular themes or people, such as the Freedom Rides or the role African American churches played in the movement.

Two years ago, National Park Service director Jonathon Jarvis challenged historians to inventory surviving civil rights landmarks.  Georgia State University found 60, which became the foundation of the trail.

Then Sentell helped spearhead an effort by TravelSouth USA to have the 12 Southern states it represents supplement the list with other worthy sites.  The result is a trail that stretches from schools in Topeka, Kan., known for the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation court decision in 1954, to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to thousands who rallied for equal opportunity in 1963.   But the vast majority of the sites are located in the South

Below are the sites in Alabama:

Anniston

        Freedom Riders National Monument

Birmingham

        16th Street Baptist Church

        Bethel Baptist Church

        Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

        Kelly Ingram Park

Monroeville

        Old Courthouse Museum

Montgomery

        Alabama State Capitol

        City of St. Jude

        Civil Rights Memorial Center

        Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church

        Dexter Parsonage Museum

        First Baptist Church on Riley Street

        Frank M. Johnson Jr. Federal Building and United States Courthouse

        Freedom Rides Museum

        Holt Street Baptist Church

        Rosa Parks Museum

  Scottsboro

        The Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center

  Selma

        Brown Chapel AME Church

        Edmund Pettus Bridge

        Lowndes Interpretive Center

        National Voting Rights Museum and Institute

        Selma Interpretive Center

        Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail

        The Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson Foundation and Museum

Tuscaloosa

        Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama

Tuskegee

        Butler Chapel AME Zion Church

        Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site

        Tuskegee History Center

        Tuskegee University



For more information please see www.civilrightstrail.com.