For Black History Month – Southern Civil Rights Sites – Part 1

It being February and I just posted the grave of VP # 13 in the Confederate bastion of Selma, Alabama, it seems appropriate to stay there and show a few of the historic places that factored into our nation’s long struggle for equality. This is especially appropriate in 2025 given we are going to hear nothing from the current administration on the subject.

While I complained about the oppressive heat in the South, the Great Sweaty Drive-away of 2024 brought us to a number of important historic sites…places that anyone interested in our nation’s history should visit…and appreciate…and pause to absorb their significance.

Edmund Pettus Bridge

Selma, Alabama (20 May 2024)

Edmond Pettus, like his Senate mate, J.T. Morgan, was also a former Grand Dragon of the Klan. He is memorialized on the bridge that crosses the Alabama River in Selma. The bridge that some want to re-name for John Lewis is famous as the site of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ violence in 1965 when civil rights marchers were attacked by Alabama police and Klan friends who welcomed the chance to legally attack Black folk in broad daylight

Just off Interstate 85, between Auburn and Montgomery, is the small City of Tuskegee. The entire campus of Tuskegee University, formerly the Tuskegee Institute, is now a National Historic Site. Founded in 1881 as a quid pro quo when the White state senator needed the votes in a majority Black county and promised to build a school for Black education. That was before the former Confederates made it easier to forget promises of Black improvement and just prevent Blacks from voting at all.

 
(Let the ‘You-Must-Not-Erase-Our-Heritage’ folk understand this is the history I want everyone to know.)

‘Lifting the Veil of Ignorance’ [1922]

By Charles Keck

Tuskegee University (20 May 2024)

The star of the Institute and one of the few Black Americans I recall learning about in school was Booker T. Washington. The founders of the new Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers brought in Washington, only 25 at the time, to run the place. The new Principal stressed academic learning along with technical skills and moral fitness. In 1901, the Institute’s success led to Washington being the first Black citizen invited to the White House to dine with the president. Teddy Roosevelt caught some shit for that.

(Southern leadership’s repugnant reaction to the event should give you pause and remind you of our nation’s racist roots.)

Grave of Booker T. Washington

Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, Alabama (20 May 2024)

The founding Principal is buried near the campus

chapel not far from the grave of a famous faculty member,

agricultural scientist George Washington Carver.