On 6/27/2017, me and my mom went on a tour to Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument in Birmingham, Alabama. There are seven stops for this park. The ones that we went to were Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Kelly Ingram Park.
The first stop that we went to was 16th Street Baptist Church. The is a beautiful church to see. We got to go inside and see it. We heard the history of this church. On September 15, 1963, there was a bombing that killed four black little girls. It was a act of the white supremacist terrorism. Four members of the KU Klux Klan planted at least 15 sticks of dynamite with a timing device at the front of the steps of the church. The girls names were: Addie, Carol, Carole and Cynthia. RIP.
In the basement of the church there is a gallery of pictures of the riots that happened in the 60’s. While we were there I remember a lady talking about the riots that happened. She found a picture of herself in a crowd.
After the church we went to a museum where you can find information about the Birmingham Civil Rights. We did a tour of the museum and they talked about black people and what white people did to them.
This is Rosa Parks. In December of 1955, she was setting in the color section on the bus. When the white color section was full the driver told her to move out of her seat in the color section for a white passenger. She didn’t move. She got arrested. They call Rosa Parks “The first lady of civil rights.” and “The mother of the freedom movement.”
Here are some statues that they had in the museum.
The left picture is what the black classroom looked like and the right is what white classroom looked like.
Across the church and the museum there is a park. There is different statues of people. Here is a couple that I saw. The first one is statues of the four girls that got killed at the church. The other statue is Martin Luther King, Jr..
Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)