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    Montgomery's Civil Heritage Trail: A History & Guide
    Montgomery's Civil Heritage Trail: A History & Guide
    Montgomery's Civil Heritage Trail: A History & Guide
    Ebook172 pages1 hour

    Montgomery's Civil Heritage Trail: A History & Guide

    By Site Directors, Friends of the Civil Heritage Trail and Morris Dees

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    About this ebook

    Montgomery's cultural heritage reflects two of America's most transformative struggles: the Civil War and the civil rights movement. On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederate States of America on the Alabama Capitol steps. Those same steps marked the final destination of the Selma-Montgomery voting rights march on March 25, 1965. The telegram to fire on Fort Sumter originated from the Winter Building on Court Square on April 11, 1861. Just down the street, and a century later, Mrs. Rosa L. Parks refused to give up her seat, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Discover these compelling stories and more surrounding the historical landmarks along Montgomery's Civil Heritage Trail.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateFeb 6, 2017
    ISBN9781625858146
    Montgomery's Civil Heritage Trail: A History & Guide
    Author

    Site Directors

    The Civil Heritage Trail was developed as a means to celebrate Montgomery's rich Civil War and civil rights heritage with visitors to the city while promoting the local business community. The historic sites and museums located in the downtown area are an integral part of the Downtown Business Association. Representatives from these various sites came together as coauthors eager to contribute and be a part of this monumental effort to share what makes Montgomery and its history unique.

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      Montgomery's Civil Heritage Trail - Site Directors

      History.

      INTRODUCTION

      On an unassuming street corner in Montgomery, Alabama, two seminal figures in American history took steps that changed their times and the times to come. Perhaps it is fortunate that Jefferson Davis and Rosa Parks were separated in time by nearly one hundred years, as each was so consumed by purpose that the two would surely have collided violently in the middle of Court Square. They missed one another in time, but the collisions of their work have reshaped their country.

      On the afternoon of April 11, 1861, Confederate president Jefferson Davis had just left a meeting with his cabinet at the Exchange Hotel. He crossed east to the only telegraph office in Montgomery with a dire purpose: something had to be done about the Federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter, and Davis meant to do it. The telegraph office had been a beehive of activity ever since the end of January, when a directive from Washington to the New Orleans customs office had been intercepted by a local telegraph operator: If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot.¹ As far as the Confederates were concerned, that January telegraph had been a declaration of war. They ratified a provisional constitution five days later and then spent February and March deciding the fate of Fort Sumter. When they learned Lincoln would provide the fort with additional provisions in mid-April, Davis decided to outmaneuver Washington. He soon reached the telegraph office and sent the message ordering Confederate troops to bomb the Union army and force it to leave Fort Sumter. The first sound of the Civil War, then, was not the boom of a cannon in Charleston but rather the clack of a telegraph in Montgomery.

      Rosa Parks sent no telegram, but her actions on December 1, 1955, delivered a message that would prove every bit as significant as Davis’s. She left work that evening and headed west across Court Square to catch the city bus home. A municipal law from 1900 said she would have to give up her seat if more whites boarded the bus, and she knew from personal experience that driver James F. Blake would enforce it—he had already threatened her a few years before. But that night, when a white passenger demanded her seat, Parks had decided she would not move. Blake hollered from the front, but she ignored him. He cut off the engine and walked back to her seat. Parks recounted later: When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’²

      She spent that night in jail, but her defiance became the catalyst for Martin Luther King’s successful boycott of city buses by African Americans. Five years later, and based largely on this event, the U.S. Supreme Court found segregation of public accommodations to be unconstitutional. Like the Civil War before it, the civil rights movement had begun with a strong message on Court Square in Montgomery, Alabama.

      That two such singular and distinct events in American history occurred within the same city square is thought provoking. That so few people know this fact is unsettling. Along the streets of Montgomery are sites where the history of the United States was irrevocably altered, yet people pass them daily with no awareness of their significance. The Civil Heritage Trail was conceived as a means for shedding light on the critical role played by the city of Montgomery in American history. The idea came to me on a school field trip to Boston my junior year of high school, and I have been advocating for it ever since.

      Of course, I did not expect to find inspiration on that trip. We were traveling to participate in Harvard’s Model United Nations, and this native Alabamian was more interested in the forecasted snowfall than in any intricacies of American history. But when our trip sponsor and AP U.S. history teacher insisted we walk the Freedom Trail, I became instantly and utterly captivated.

      Arguably the most significant historical attraction in Boston, the Freedom Trail is a two-and-a-half-mile-long route connecting sixteen sites along the streets of the city and across nearly four hundred years of American history. A tourist can pick up the route within the manicured gardens of Boston Common, walk past the Old State House and Faneuil Hall, visit Paul Revere’s silversmith shop and the Old North Two-if-by-Sea Church and then end the journey on the other side of Boston Harbor with the USS Constitution and the monument to the Battle of Bunker Hill. For a relatively young nation like the United States, such sites make up our history, and I was enthralled to experience it by walking the Freedom Trail.

      While the sites are old, the Freedom Trail itself is relatively young. When I researched later, I learned that it was conceived as a specific solution to a tangible threat once facing Boston: urban blight. In 1951, a travel writer for the Boston Herald named Bill Schofield lamented the fact that in downtown Boston, similar to other cities nationwide, people and money were fleeing in favor of those shiny, new postwar suburbs accessible to anyone with a car and a down payment. Back in the cities, centuries-old buildings were demolished, and parking lots were paved over the remains. In Boston, Faneuil Hall, now often called the cradle of liberty because figures like Revere and John Adams met in the upper room to plan the Revolution, was narrowly saved from demolition. Other sites, however, did not survive. The Boston Latin School—where Sam Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock all studied—is today marked by only a plaque on the Freedom Trail.

      Schofield, as a travel writer, understood a relevant point about people and history: we crave a connection to our past, and we believe that places can mediate that connection to us today. People will travel the world to walk in the footsteps of great men and women. Humans have an almost primal desire to experience for themselves the history that continues to shape their lives; if the best link to that history is a place, then people will invariably visit that place.

      With this fact in mind, Schofield argued that Boston should link its remaining sites of historic significance into a unified attraction. He suggested painting a line down the center of the sidewalk to guide tourists from one location to the next. Sites that naturally drew many visitors, such as the Massachusetts State House or the site of the Boston Massacre, could lead visitors to burial grounds and historic markers that, though located between the important sites, tended to be neglected. Everyone would benefit, and the plan would cost only as much as a bucket of

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