Civil Rights Family Program

Arrive in Montgomery and transfer to our hotel, steps away from the Rosa Parks bus stop. Meet with the group for a welcome orientation and dinner.

Travel by boat on the Alabama River to visit the newly opened Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre site filled with sculptures and other artifacts, which honors the lives and memories of enslaved Black people in America. Wander among pieces of art by Alison Saar, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Wangechi Mutu, Rose B. Simpson, Theaster Gates, and Kehinde Wiley. After lunch, visit the preserved Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, which appears as it did when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. served as a pastor. Discuss the day’s events over dinner together.

Depart this morning for our drive to Birmingham. There, at the 16th Street Baptist Church, meet with Reverend Carolyn McKinstry, who was 14 and inside the church when a bomb planted by white supremacists killed four young girls in September 1963. View Kelly Ingram Park across the street, site of civil rights rallies. Continue our journey to Selma, where we see the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, from which three marches from Selma to Montgomery began. Converse with a movement foot soldier whose civil rights work spans decades. Walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge before returning to Montgomery via the 54-mile Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, which commemorates the route of the 1965 Voting Rights March in Alabama. Dinner this evening is at leisure.

Visit the Centennial Hill area this morning with Dr. Valda Harris Montgomery, who shares her experience as a teenage daughter of civil rights activists and playmate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s children. Continue to the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Created by the Equal Justice Initiative, the museum investigates the history of racial injustice and the narratives that have sustained injustice across generations. After lunch at a local restaurant, take time to reflect at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a six-acre memorial that uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. Dinner this evening is at leisure.

Travel to the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site where we learn about the women and men of the “Tuskegee Experience” and their impact on military desegregation and the Civil Rights movement. Continue to the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site to see the historic campus of the college founded for African Americans in 1881 and the home of its first principal, Booker T. Washington. Return to Montgomery for lunch and visit the state-of-the-art Rosa Parks Museum which depicts events that started the bus boycott and the early Civil Rights movement. Share our experiences during an unforgettable farewell reception and dinner at the Bricklayers Hall, the former headquarters of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) where Dr. King, other leaders, and MIA staff organized the Montgomery bus boycott.

Transfer independently to the airport for flights home.