Civil Rights Movement Sites

Now that the list of components for the US Civil Rights Movement Sites Tentative World Heritage Site nomination has filled out, I figured I should write about some of the locations that have yet to be reviewed. I visited the three sites closest to my home on the US East Coast in the summer of 2023. One of the sites, the Lincoln Memorial, was covered quite well in Solivagant's excellent review based on his firsthand experience at the March on Washington. The other two sites, Moton High School and the F.W. Woolworth Store, are a bit further off the beaten track for most visitors. I'll cover Moton High School for this review.

Moton High School is located in Farmville, a small town in central Virginia. Prince Edward County constructed Moton in 1939 as a segregated public school for African American youth in Farmville, but the town neglected the school in favor of funding improvements at the white high school on the other side of town. Moton was overcrowded, shoddily repaired, and inaptly heated for the student body. In 1951, Barbara Johns, a junior (the penultimate year of the US high school system), initiated a student-led walkout from classes, appealing to her fellow students to picket outside the school and the county courthouse to raise awareness of the poor conditions at Moton and to demand change. Of note, they requested to conduct this protest on their own, wanting to protect their teachers who they loved from consequences.

The National …

The announcement  that the Lincoln Memorial is to be added to the Civil Rights Movement T List entry has prompted me to post a review of my first visit to it EXACTLY 61 years ago on 28 Aug 1963 - the very day of the "March on Washington", the event which has led to the memorial's nomination! I was a 20-year-old UK undergraduate traveling and working in the US across his 3 month summer vacation. My diary observations, scribbled throughout the day, together with some additional research into both the March and the Memorial might be of interest.

There was significant concern that violence would erupt and my parents and employers cautioned against making the journey down from NYC. 1963 had already been a violent year and, just 18 days later, 4 young girls were to be killed in a KKK bombing atrocity at the 16th St Baptist Church in Birmingham AL (also included in this T List site).. As it turned out, Washington was relaxed and friendly on that glorious summer day. Large numbers of police had been deployed, but their presence was in no way oppressive - indeed, to me, it was hardly noticeable and no violence occurred. I made my way along the route of the March up to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (photo). Unsurprisingly, there were relatively few “whites” in the crowd - but neither were they totally absent. I have often since perused the news videos of those long ago …

While touring the 16th Street Baptist Church, the docent shared stories of segregated Birmingham and the challenges of integration. One of the docents was part of the "Children's Crusade" demonstrations which gathered around 16th Street Baptist Church. Under Alabama law, demonstrators who protested racial segregation were arrested. Police dogs, high-pressure firehouses were used to disrupt these protests, which should be noted were often occurring in or around the 'Black Business District'. My spouse, who only recently became a US citizen was astonished by the extent of the racially segregated architecture, town-planning, and landscape design in Birmingham. She is not unfamiliar with American History, but the racially-based system generally is understood at the surface level (restrooms, schools, restaurants, public pools, drinking fountains). In fact, the boundary of the 'Black Business District' in Birmingham abuts the 16th Street Baptist Church. The grid of Black Birmingham is not hard to trace. In January 2017, Barack Obama designated 15th-17th streets a National Monument, which includes the 16th Street Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, A.G. Gaston Hotel (newly restored), the Masonic Temple, and Bethel Baptist Church (the later component is 3 miles away). Today, the 16th Street Baptist Church is most associated with and known domestically for the KKK domestic terrorist bombing that killed 4 young girls as they put on their choir robes for Sunday School. The church itself looks "fortress-like" and it is a marvel that it withstood 19 sticks of dynamite fully intact. The docents go …

In October 2011, after a business trip to Atlanta, GA, I drove to Alabama and visited Birmingham, including the 16th Street Baptist Church and Bethel Baptist Church, which are included in the Civil Rights Movement Sites on the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. I also visited Rickwood Field, built in 1910 and the oldest surviving professional baseball park in the United States, and Sloss Furnaces, which operated as a pig iron-producing blast furnace from 1882 to 1971 (www.slossfurnaces.com/). After lunch at Irondale Cafe, opened in 1926 (www.irondalecafe.com/), I attended the Talladega 500 at Talladega Superspeedway.