These must-see civil rights sites in the South enlighten, inspire

“Civil rights tourism.”

It’s a troublesome term, a vexed concept.

“Tourist,” in the vernacular, has become a put-down. A tourist, by this definition, is tacky and superficial.

Tourists take pictures but don’t look below the surface. They collect souvenirs, not insights. When tourists take selfies, they turn their backs on the very sights that supposedly attracted their attention in the first place.

But the new explosion of opportunities in what has become characterized as “civil rights” or “heritage” tourism means to challenge these assumptions.

Bolstered by the spending power of African-American travelers and by the increasing interest in recent U.S. history sparked by the semicentennial anniversaries of key events in the justice struggles of the 1960s, the civil rights museums, memorials and markers springing up throughout the South emphasize education and enlightenment over mere vacation entertainment.

These places aim to chasten and inspire — to open eyes and minds as well as wallets. This is tourism with a purpose, dedicated to a reallife story that remains in flux and in progress.

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, for example, “provokes thoughtful debate and serves as a catalyst for positive social change,” according to its mission statement.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, meanwhile, hopes “to enlighten each generation about civil and human rights by exploring our common past and working together in the present to build a better future.”

With such lofty ambitions, these institutions are the heirs to the war memorials, battlefield parks and Founding Fathers historical sites inspired by earlier struggles over America’s identity, even as the exhibits within their walls rebuke the country’s failure to fulfill the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”

The messaging can be blunt. Opened in December, the $90 million Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson promises “eight interactive galleries that show the systematic oppression of black Mississippians and their fight for equality that transformed the state and nation.” This is a pitch aimed at tourists seeking more than thrill rides, postcards and costumed mascots.

Launched on the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday, the online “U.S. Civil Rights Trail” — a project of 14 state tourism departments, plus the District of Columbia, with the cooperation of the National Park Service — includes an interactive map with some 130 sites across a loosely defined “South” that stretches from Delaware to Kansas. To visit each one might represent a lifetime’s work of activity, so here is a less definitive guide: a listing of 12 — one for each month of the year — essential or interesting locations that are near to home or that can be reached by car from Memphis in under four hours. (In other words, Nashville and Birmingham are in; Montgomery and Atlanta are out.)

THE INSTITUTIONS

› Has any other national site of tragedy been so thoroughly repurposed as the National Civil Rights Museum in Downtown Memphis? Preceding the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for African-American History and Culture by 26 years and Atlanta’s National Center for Civil and Human Rights by 23, the National Civil Rights Museum was constructed around the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, while in Memphis to mobilize support for the city’s striking sanitation workers.

An important location even before the assassination, the Lorraine was the home-away-from-home base for traveling African-American musicians and civil rights leaders during the era of segregation. Some of the hotel survives: The balcony where King was killed has been preserved, in recognition of its status as a Golgotha for a modern martyr — a “sacred” albeit tragic place, in the words of King’s colleague, Ralph Abernathy. Behind the vintage motel exterior are interactive exhibits that tell what the museum’s website calls “an American story … the history of the uprising that pushed national and international civil rights forward.”

› Dedicated on Dec. 9 (an event marred by controversy due to a museum visit that day by President Donald Trump, regarded by many as hostile to the idea of racial equality), the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson is the newcomer among major civil rights attractions. The museum “refuses to sugarcoat history,” according to a review in The New York Times: Its galleries chronicle lynchings and other murders as well as the brave responses of those who challenged the state’s institutional racism. The names still resonate: James Meredith; Medgar Evers; Emmett Till; Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman.

› Opened 16 months after the dedication of the Memphis museum, Alabama’s Birmingham Civil Rights Institute attempts to be a place of healing within a so-called “civil rights district” notable for its racist violence and bloodshed (including several infamous church bombings). The museum’s artifact collection includes the door from the cell where King wrote his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a key text of the civil rights movement in which King disputed the notion that civil rights activism was an “extremist” threat to so-called mainstream America and asserted that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Wrote King: “… The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?”

THE LOCATIONS

› Whether identified as Leflore County Road 518 or Money Road, the lonely 20 miles of curvy north-south asphalt that connect Greenwood, Miss., and state Highway 8 is among the most fraught stretches of travel in the country. Make this drive and you’ll pass the Tallahatchie River bridge location that supposedly inspired Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe”; you’ll come to the ragged church graveyard that is believed to contain the remains of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson; and — about 125 miles south of Memphis, in Money, Miss., — you’ll find the ruins of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, where 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black youth visiting relatives from Chicago, was accused on Aug. 28, 1955, of whistling at a 21-yearold white woman. Till’s beaten, mutilated body was recovered from the Tallahatchie three days later. To expose the savagery of the murder to the public, Till’s mother insisted on an open coffin funeral for her child. Photographs of the body that appeared in Jet magazine ignited worldwide outrage; they still spark controversy, as the images continue to be adopted by painters and others for political works of art. For more information and context, seek out the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, in Glendora, and the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, in Sumner.

› Eight years after Till’s murder, the nation was shocked again when four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair and Carole Robertson, ranging in age from 11 to 14 — were killed on Sept. 15, 1963, in a bomb explosion caused by members of the Ku Klux Klan at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. A frequent headquarters for civil rights strategizing and Southern Christian Leadership Conference training, the church eventually was repaired. It’s open for tours and still houses an active congregation, which bills itself as “a community that firmly believes in God’s word.”

› Another martyr to the cause was Medgar Evers, 37, the NAACP field secretary who was felled on June 12, 1963, by a Klansman assassin in the driveway of his home at 2332 Margaret W. Alexander Drive in Jackson, Miss. (Evers was wearing a shirt that said: “Jim Crow Must Go.”) A modest ranch house with a carport and chain-link-fenced backyard instantly familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1960s, the house has been restored to its Evers-era appearance and is now open as the Medgar Evers Home Museum.

› Civil rights history involves triumph as well as tragedy. Little Rock Central High School is an official “National Historic Site,” but it remains a functioning public school, six decades after the black students known as the “Little Rock Nine” desegregated its classrooms in 1957 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education case, which declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional. If the Emmett Till photos testified to the existence of soulless evil, the famous photos of the Little Rock Nine — escorted into school under the protection of U.S. soldiers, sent to Arkansas by President Dwight D. Eisenhower — are action portraits of courage under pressure and hope in defiance of despair.

› Perhaps because they didn’t attract the lethal violence of Alabama, Mississippi and 1968 Memphis, the Nashville sit-ins — a series of nonviolent protests that targeted 10 segregated downtown lunch counters for three months in early 1960 — remain an underappreciated aspect of the civil rights story. The participants were mostly students from historically black colleges, inspired by the highly publicized sit-ins that had begun two weeks earlier in Greensboro, N.C. Although those Walgreens/ Woolworth’s/Kress/etc. lunch counters have closed, a new Nashville restaurant, Woolworth on 5th, at 2121 Fifth Ave. N., pays homage to the sit-ins and is in the historic F.W. Woolworth building of the original events.

› A historical marker at the uber-cool corner address of Beale Street and Rufus Thomas Boulevard pays homage to Ida B. Wells, the 19th-century anti-lynching crusader whose activism spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1890s, the former LeMoyne Owen College student turned investigative journalist worked as a writer and editor for the influential black-owned Memphis Free Speech and Headlight; the newspaper’s office was located near the site of the historical marker.

› On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his fiery last speech, now known as the “Mountaintop” speech, in the impressive sanctuary of the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ at 930 Mason in South Memphis. A rousing call to activism for striking sanitation workers and their supporters, the speech was not only uncompromising in its advocacy of black boycotts of white merchants and its defiance of “injunctions,” “dogs” and “water hoses,” it seemed almost a prophecy of his assassination, which occurred the next day: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. … And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

Opened in 1940, Mason Temple remains active as the world headquarters for COGIC, the predominantly African-American Pentecostal denomination that claims more than 6.5 million members in the U.S. alone.

THE STATUES (OR NOT)

› Tucked on the Ole Miss campus, in a place you may not have come across if what lures you to Oxford is football, food and Square Books, is the James Meredith statue. Sculpted by Oxford’s Rod Moorhead, the statue was erected in 2006, 40 years after Meredith became the first black student admitted into the University of Mississippi after his challenge of the school’s segregationist policies was supported by the Supreme Court.

Between the Lyceum and the J.D. Williams Library, the lifesized statue depicts Meredith in full stride, as if moving into a more hopeful future. The pose also reminds the viewer of Meredith’s famous 1963 “March Against Fear,” which he intended as a 220mile solo walk from Memphis to Jackson, Miss., to protest racism and bring attention to the cause of voters’ rights. Meredith was shot by a white sniper on the second day of the march; by the time he was able to rejoin his route, some 15,000 other marchers had joined in to show solidarity with Meredith’s cause.

› Martin Luther King, Freedom Riders and bus boycotts belong to history, but civil rights activism remains ongoing. From New Orleans — where Robert E. Lee can no longer be found atop the monumental pedestal at the center of the traffic circle that bears his name — to Memphis — where Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis have been forcibly evicted from the former city parks where once they reigned — the South is removing monuments dedicated to men who chose the perpetuation of slavery over continued loyalty to the U.S. government. Go see the empty pedestals of Mississippi River Park (formerly Jefferson Davis Park) and Health Sciences Park (formerly Nathan Bedford Forrest Park) and contemplate how much has changed, how much needs to change and what should come next.