Wednesday-Friday, December 4-6, 2019                                                         

Where History Runs Deep: ASG Visits Montgomery, Alabama

American history is woven into the soul of Montgomery, Alabama, a small city of 200,000 and the state capital.  Alabama was one of the original seven confederate states, and Montgomery hosted the Confederacy’s founding at the 1861 Montgomery Convention, and then became the first capital of the Confederacy. About a century later, in 1955, Montgomery became the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.   Montgomery is full of museums and monuments that reflect both of these histories. We will explore both aspects but our focus will be on America’s history of racial injustice and its legacy. A focal point of the trip will be the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, a museum built on the site of a former warehouse where slaves were imprisoned that displays the history of slavery and racism in America, revealing how the slavery system did not end but evolved from the family-shattering domestic slave trade to the decades of lynching terror, to the suffocating segregation of Jim Crow to the age of mass incarceration in which we now live. Then a short walk to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, an acclaimed six-acre collection of sculpture and commemorative architecture that commands attention to the more than 4,000 lynchings that occurred in 800 American counties from Reconstruction to 1950 during a long-term campaign of racist terror. Both sites are the inspiration of Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative.   We will also visit the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center designed by Maya Lin, and the Rosa Parks Museum; several Confederate monuments and historic sites; Riverwalk and Old Alabama Town; and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art. We anticipate an informative, enlightening 2-1/2 day trip.  Our trip has been planned by Lenel Srochi Meyerhoff who is looking forward to her 3rd trip to Montgomery. 

Members-only; A full Trip Description and Reply Form will be distributed in late August.