montgomery alabama sights attractions

This church is most famous for early civil rights activity, most famously the 1956 Bus Boycott directed by Dr. King from his office in the lower unit of the church. In 1978, the name was changed to Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, in memory of its twentieth pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the congregation from 1954 to 1960.

For 150 years the Alabama State Capitol has overlooked downtown Montgomery from its hilltop setting. This National Historic Landmark is a working museum of state history and politics. The Confederacy began in the senate chamber when delegates from southern states voted to establish a new nation in February 1861. A brass star on the west portico marks the location where Jefferson Davis stood to be inaugurated as the first and only president of the Confederacy. A little more than a century later in the spring of 1965 the Selma to Montgomery March for voting rights culminated at the capitol steps. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made one of his greatest speeches to an estimated 25,000 people.

The First White House of the Confederacy was the Executive Residence of President Jefferson Davis and family while the capitol of the Confederacy was in Montgomery, Alabama. The house served as the first White House of the Confederacy from February 1861 until late May 1861, when the Confederate capital moved to Richmond, Virginia. Completely furnished with original period pieces from the 1850s and 1860s, the 1835 Italianate style house is open to the public. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974. It is located across from the south side of the Alabama State Capitol, next door to Archives and History Building.

The Rosa Parks Museum is an active memorial to the life of civil rights icon Rosa Parks and the lessons of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that brought racial integration to transportation and international attention to civil rights. Located in downtown Montgomery, close to the site where Mrs. Parks was arrested, it is the nations only museum dedicated to Rosa Parks. The museums collection contains the original fingerprint arrest record of Mrs. Parks. The main exhibit is to sit on a bus and experience the minute by minute account of what happened the day she was arrested.

This memorial is a circular black granite table with the names of the martyrs and chronicles the history of the movement in lines that radiate like the hands of a clock. Water emerges from the table's center and flows evenly across the top. On a curved black granite wall behind the table is engraved Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s well-known paraphrase of Amos 5:24: We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Civil Rights Memorial invites visitors to touch the engraved names.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opened in 2018, is the nations first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people terrorized by lynching, humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and other injustices.