MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Fairview Plaza is a dingy strip mall near Interstate 65 at the city's edge. But one day, state officials predict, throngs will come to revisit a key point in the civil rights movement.
Alabama plans to buy the mall for $2 million to make way for a federally run visitors center. The state also has set aside $1 million to preserve the real draw - the nearby field where participants in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march camped the night before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led them to the state Capitol.
The center could take several years to complete, but the eventual goal will be to welcome 800,000 visitors a year. "If we're successful, this site is going to operate like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking cars off the interstate," said Lee Warner, director of the Alabama Historical Commission.
Throughout the city where King made his name a half-century ago as a young civil rights leader, landmarks in the struggle for racial equality are being preserved, renovated or expanded. Projects expected to cost more than $25 million are under way or expected to start in coming years, and observers say the results will bring the civil rights movement to life for a new generation.
"No city has as much history or is doing as much with it," said Jim Carrier, a former reporter who lives here and is writing a book on civil rights landmarks. "It's going to be a major industry here. Right now we're just cranking up."
Montgomery played early roles in two of the nation's greatest upheavals: the Civil War and civil rights movement.
You can stand in one spot and see where Confederate President Jefferson Davis sent the telegram in 1861 ordering Southern troops to fire on Fort Sumter, S.C., the opening shot of the Civil War, and see where Rosa Parks began her famous bus ride nearly a century later in 1955. Her refusal to give up her seat to a white man spawned a boycott, launching the civil rights movement and bringing King to prominence.
But until recently, most of the public homage in the city was paid to the Confederacy. Only last year did the City Council take Montgomery's motto, "Cradle of the Confederacy," and add "Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement."
There is no entity coordinating the numerous new projects commemorating the civil rights era, no one factor driving the trend. But a major impetus is the 50th anniversary of the bus boycott in 2005. Another aim is to cash in on the growth of heritage tourism.
Major projects include:
Visitors centers at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church and its parsonage several blocks away, and new exhibits in the church where King preached.
An interpretative center about the Freedom Rides at the dormant Greyhound bus station downtown, where passengers were beaten for testing court orders to integrate bus stations.
An expansion of the 2- year-old Rosa Parks Museum at Troy State University.
Markers on the Capitol grounds, which are now dominated by a Confederate memorial and related statues.
Also, the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, best known for winning damages in lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists, is creating a $2 million interactive center focused on fighting hate in any guise.
'A lot of effort recently'
Carrier, for one, chafes at how long it has taken to reach this point. Although the Jim Crow laws have long been repealed, schools and neighborhoods are still largely black or white, as is the case in many American cities with substantial minority populations.
Others with deep roots here take a long view. The tumult of the 1950s and 1960s was so great, they say, that a few decades amount to the blink of an eye.
"History takes time to evolve," said the Rev. Michael Thurman of the Dexter Avenue church, sitting in an office little changed since King's day.
It was not until 33 years after the Civil War ended that the soaring Confederate Memorial was dedicated next to the bone-white Capitol, Warner pointed out. The establishment of new civil rights memorials seems to be following a similar timetable, he said.
"Rather than say, 'Why did it take so long?' what we should say is, 'Now is the time for it,'" Warner said.
"There has been a lot of effort recently to make up for the neglect of the civil rights movement," said Derryn Moten, associate professor of humanities at Alabama State University, stressing that the fight "for equal justice" is still not over.
The changes extend beyond Montgomery. Last year in Oxford, Miss., a marker was planted to commemorate James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962 as the first black student and rioting by whites.
Also, a $150,000 civil rights memorial is being built on the campus, whose student body is 13 percent black. The idea arose after a group of students realized that campus symbols were not "inclusive," said Susan Glisson, director of the university's Institute for Racial Reconciliation.
To Glisson, the memorial will be a valuable teaching tool. "Students just don't know that history," she said. "On one level, it's a mark of how much change has occurred that it seems impossible to students that life could have been that bad. On another, it's historical amnesia."
The additions will complement a number of civil rights institutions in the South. The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis opened in 1991, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute followed a year later.
Each attracts about 150,000 visitors a year, figures not lost on Montgomery's business community. The local Chamber of Commerce hopes to promote the city as a key destination for heritage tourism, said Anna Buckalew, a chamber officer.
Until two years ago, there was relatively little to do here in Montgomery. Visitors could take in the King mural in the Dexter Avenue church. They could meditate at the Civil Rights Memorial, which features water flowing over black granite and the names of 40 people killed during the movement.
Missing were places to step inside and learn in depth about what happened.
"There was a thirst," Carrier said. "People were coming here to see civil rights sites, and the city was providing virtually nothing." That began changing in 2000 when the Rosa Parks Museum opened downtown.
Though the 1955-1956 boycott is generally well-known, the museum tries to make it come alive. One room contains an old bus that has video screens instead of windows. The images aim to make it seem as if you are looking into Parks' bus.
Two friends from South Carolina, Louise B. Holmes and Donna Burley, toured the museum this month.
"It is really something to see this," Holmes said. "I'm sure you know how we feel as African-Americans."
Rebecca French, a white Gettysburg College sophomore, said, "You can read an eloquent book, but being here completes the experience, completes the learning."
The museum attracts about 33,000 visitors a year, said director Georgette Norman. It plans to add an interactive children's annex with an archive documenting stories from the boycott. The expansion should be completed in 2005, she said.
King Memorial Church
The next visible change will be at the Dexter Avenue church's parsonage, where King and his family lived from 1954 to 1960. The modest white house will be restored to look as it did during the boycott, when the house was bombed with King's wife and daughter inside.
An orientation center will be built next to the parsonage for lectures about King's life and about the Centennial Hill area, where many middle-class blacks lived. The projects will cost about $300,000.
Bigger plans await the red-brick church, which is a block from the Capitol. A visitors center will be built behind the church to showcase the role of black churches in the movement, and new exhibits will open in the church.
Thurman, the pastor, is not advertising the cost of the center, but it could hit $10 million, so a capital campaign will be launched. It is worth it, he said: "We have a moral obligation for historic preservation."
Another expensive project is the Freedom Rides museum in the old bus station. That could cost $8 million, said Warner, whose state agency leases the site from the federal government. The goal is to raise private funds.
Other landmarks
The poverty law center, behind the Dexter Avenue church, expects its new Civil Rights Memorial Center to open late next year, said spokeswoman Penny Weaver. Part of its mission will be to remind visitors that hate persists. To that end, white supremacists' speeches will be aired and visitors will be able take hidden-bias tests.
The voting-rights campground, now part of the City of St. Jude complex owned by the Catholic archdiocese, will take longer to develop. Warner said the visitors center - whose price tag could easily run into the millions - needs congressional approval and is at least five years away. He said the archdiocese, owner of both field and shopping center, is a willing seller.
The spot is significant because that night's camp received much publicity, Warner said. "It was the night Hollywood stars came - Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte." Months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Nothing promises to raise as much dispute as changing the Capitol grounds, with its Confederate Memorial, solemn Jefferson Davis statue, and statue of John Allan Wyeth, "Confederate soldier, surgeon and author."
There is no mention there of the civil rights movement, and Warner vows to change that. "I don't know how, nor do I know when," he said. "What I do know is it will change."
Such talk worries defenders of the Confederacy's legacy.
"We are dead-set against it," said Steven Fitts, president of the state chapter of the League of the South. "We are afraid it will be turned into nothing but a civil rights shrine, and all the history from the Confederacy will be distorted."
Fitts says the voting-rights marchers never made it to the Capitol grounds (though only because police barred them). Moreover, he said, the march "was a lot of outside people coming in."
Warner says there have been mixed reactions to the preservation and recognition efforts.
"There are blatant racists. There are others, though not motivated by race, who yearn for life the way it was 50 years ago," he said. But many people are supportive, and Warner, who is white, sees "genuine respect and affection" among blacks and whites.