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| Location | Montgomery, Alabama |
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| Designer | Maya Lin |
| Material | Granite |
| Opening date | 1989 |
| Website | www.splcenter.org |
The Civil Rights Memorial is an American memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, created by Maya Lin. The names of 41 people are inscribed on the granite fountain as martyrs who were killed in the civil rights movement. [1] The memorial is sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center. [2]
The names included in the memorial belong to those who were killed between 1955 and 1968. The dates chosen represent a time when legalized segregation was prominent. In 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in schools was unlawful and 1968 is the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The monument was created by Maya Lin, who also created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. [2] The Civil Rights Memorial was dedicated in 1989. [1]
The concept of Lin's design is based on the soothing and healing effect of water. It was inspired by a passage from King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech "...we will not be satisfied "until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream..." The quotation in the passage, which is inscribed on the memorial, is a direct paraphrase of Amos 5:24, as translated in the American Standard Version of the Bible. The memorial is a fountain in the form of an asymmetric inverted stone cone. A film of water flows over the base of the cone, which contains the 41 names included. It is possible to touch the smooth film of water and to alter it temporarily, which quickly returns to smoothness. The memorial is designed in a timeline manner. It begins with Brown v. Board in 1954, and ends with Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968.
The memorial is in downtown Montgomery, at 400 Washington Avenue, in an open plaza in front of the Civil Rights Memorial Center, which was the offices of the Southern Poverty Law Center until it moved across the street into a new building in 2001. The memorial may be visited freely 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. [2]
The Civil Rights Memorial Center offers guided group tours, lasting approximately one hour. Tours are available by appointment, Monday to Saturday. [3]
The memorial is only a few blocks from other historic sites, including the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, the Alabama State Capitol, the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the corners where Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks boarded buses in 1955 on which they would later refuse to give up their seats, and the Rosa Parks Library and Museum.
The 41 names included in the Civil Rights Memorial are those of: [4] [5]
"The Forgotten" are 74 people who are identified in a display at the Civil Rights Memorial Center. These names were not inscribed on the Memorial because there was insufficient information about their deaths at the time the Memorial was created. [6] However, it is thought that these people were killed as a result of racially motivated violence between 1952 and 1968. [7]
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Christian minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A Black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
Ralph David Abernathy Sr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was ordained in the Baptist tradition in 1948. As a leader of the civil rights movement, he was a close friend and mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. He collaborated with King and E. D. Nixon to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led to the Montgomery bus boycott and co-created and was an executive board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He became president of the SCLC following the assassination of King in 1968; he led the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., as well as other marches and demonstrations for disenfranchised Americans. He also served as an advisory committee member of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression; they were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South. By highlighting racial injustice, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the civil rights movement.
Viola Fauver Liuzzo was an American civil rights activist. In March 1965, Liuzzo heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr. and traveled from Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. At the age of 39, while driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was fatally hit by shots fired from a pursuing car containing Ku Klux Klan members Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., William Orville Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and Gary Thomas Rowe, the last of whom was actually an undercover informant working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park covers about 35 acres (0.14 km2) and includes several sites in Atlanta, Georgia related to the life and work of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Within the park is his boyhood home, and Ebenezer Baptist Church — the church where King was baptized and both he and his father, Martin Luther King Sr., were pastors — as well as, the grave site of King, Jr., and his wife, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King.
James Joseph Reeb was an American Unitarian Universalist minister, pastor, and activist during the civil rights movement in Washington, D.C., and Boston, Massachusetts. While participating in the Selma to Montgomery marches actions in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he was murdered by white segregationists and white supremacists, dying of head injuries in the hospital two days after being severely beaten. Three men were tried for Reeb's murder but were acquitted by an all-white jury. His murder remains officially unsolved.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is a national memorial located in West Potomac Park next to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It covers four acres (1.6 ha) and includes the Stone of Hope, a granite statue of Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. carved by sculptor Lei Yixin. The inspiration for the memorial design is a line from King's "I Have a Dream" speech: "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope." The memorial opened to the public on August 22, 2011, after more than two decades of planning, fund-raising, and construction.
James Gardner Clark, Jr. was the sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, United States from 1955 to 1966. He was one of the officials responsible for the violent arrests of civil rights protestors during the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, and is remembered as a racist whose brutal tactics included using cattle prods against unarmed civil rights supporters.
Jimmie Lee Jackson was an African American civil rights activist in Marion, Alabama, and a deacon in the Baptist church. On February 18, 1965, while unarmed and participating in a peaceful voting rights march in his city, he was beaten by troopers and fatally shot by an Alabama state trooper. Jackson died eight days later in the hospital.
James Edward Orange, also known as "Shackdaddy", was a leading civil rights activist in the Civil Rights Movement in America. He was assistant to Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement. Orange joined the civil rights marches led by King and Ralph Abernathy in Atlanta in 1963. Later he became a project coordinator for Southern Christian Leadership Conference, drawing young people into the movement.
Selma, Lord, Selma is a 1999 American made-for-television biographical drama film based on true events that happened in March 1965, known as Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. The film tells the story through the eyes of an 9-year-old African-American girl named Sheyann Webb. It was directed by Charles Burnett, one of the pioneers of African-American independent cinema. It premiered on ABC on January 17, 1999.
The St. Augustine movement was a part of the wider Civil Rights Movement, taking place in St. Augustine, Florida from 1963 to 1964. It was a major event in the city's long history and had a role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Bernard Lee was an activist and member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Civil Rights Movement. He was a key associate of Martin Luther King Jr.
The first decorative fountain in the United States was dedicated in Philadelphia in 1809. Early American fountains were used to distribute clean drinking water, had little ornamentation, and copied European styles.
The history of the 1954 to 1968 American civil rights movement has been depicted and documented in film, song, theater, television, and the visual arts. These presentations add to and maintain cultural awareness and understanding of the goals, tactics, and accomplishments of the people who organized and participated in this nonviolent movement.
Ben Chester White was an African-American caretaker, uninvolved in the civil rights movement, shot down by the KKK. This was likely in an attempt to move focus away from James Meredith’s March Against Fear or to lure Martin Luther King, Jr. in an assassination attempt. This murder went unnoticed by King.
Hope Moving Forward is a public monument in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Dedicated in 2021, the monument consists of a bronze statue of Martin Luther King Jr. designed by Basil Watson atop a pedestal. It is located at the intersection of Northside Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
John Robert Zellner is an American civil rights activist. He graduated from Huntingdon College in 1961 and that year became a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as its first white field secretary. Zellner was involved in numerous civil rights efforts, including nonviolence workshops at Talladega College, protests for integration in Danville, Virginia, and organizing Freedom Schools in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1964. He also investigated the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner that summer.
32°22′35″N86°18′12″W / 32.37626°N 86.30325°W
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