Sitting in the jury box of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., in 2023, Anne Wernau had a spiritual experience. She was visiting the courthouse to learn about the 1955 kidnapping and murder of a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till by two white men.
After hearing details of the brutal killing, the media spectacle of the five-day trial, and the brief deliberation of the all-white jury that acquitted the murderers, Wernau and other visitors absorbed what they had just learned. They then took turns reading passages from the county’s official apology presented to the Till family in 2007, when Tallahatchie County finally broke its 50-year silence and took responsibility for its role.
“We sat in the seats the jury sat in,” Wernau reflects. “Most of us could barely get through reading our passages. But it was almost like that little boy was there, saying, ‘I’m glad the truth is being told.’”
She and a friend were on a 10-day guided tour of four Southern states, visiting historic sites along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. A retired violence-prevention educator from East Lyme, Conn., Wernau, who is white, had lived through the Civil Rights era and always considered herself a supporter. But she also recognized she had little comprehension of what life as a Black person in America was like then — or is like now.
“I realized I needed to know the truth about that era, to be on the ground where this all happened, and to be able to feel a little of what people living at that time felt,” she says. “It was spiritual. It was emotional. It was intellectual. It impacted me in absolutely every way.”
History Up Close
Established in 2018, the U.S. Civil Rights Trail comprises more than 130 sites — museums, churches, libraries, schools, monuments, landmarks, lunch counters, streets, parks, and trails — across 15 states and the District of Columbia where activists in the 1950s and ’60s challenged racial segregation.
Four major museums along the trail interpret the movement: the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Ala.; the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta; and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Miss.
Travelers can create their own itineraries with resources found online, starting at www.civilrightstrail.com. (On a road trip? Download and listen to The United States Civil Rights Trail podcast.)
These are just a few of the landmarks you can visit to learn more about some of the troubling, powerful, and critical periods of our nation’s history.
National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis
From the mid-1940s, the Lorraine Motel was included in the Negro Travelers’ Green Book, which listed hotels and other businesses that welcomed Black travelers during the Jim Crow era. But the motel is infamous as the site where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, on April 4, 1968, on the second-floor balcony.
The Lorraine is now at the center of the National Civil Rights Museum, where visitors can dive deep into the 400-year history of the Black struggle for human rights in America. You can sit in a vintage bus beside a statue of Rosa Parks; in a replica of the flame- and smoke-damaged Greyhound coach that the Freedom Riders narrowly escaped; and in Room 306, where MLK spent his final hours.
Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail
This 54-mile trail follows the path activists marched in March 1965 to protest policies preventing Black Americans from registering to vote. Beginning at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, Ala., and crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge toward Montgomery, Ala., protestors attempted this march three times.
The first march, of around 600 people on March 7, was led by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman John Lewis and Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When they arrived at the bridge, they were attacked by local authorities and white vigilante groups, and about 60 activists were injured, some gravely.
Two days later, a group of more than 2,000, led by Martin Luther King Jr., marched to the bridge and prayed, before turning around in observance of a court order preventing them from making the full march.
On March 21, with the support of President Lyndon Johnson and under the protection of the U.S. Army and the Alabama National Guard, the marchers started their five-day journey to Montgomery. These marches represented a key moment leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Beyond the Trail
Enrich your travel by visiting sites around the country to learn about the struggles and triumphs of other groups working to claim civil liberties.
- The Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y., was the setting in 1848 of the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention, which launched the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. Participants gathered “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of Woman.”
- The César E. Chávez National Monument in Keene, Calif., memorializes the farmworkers’ movement that improved working conditions and wages and brought about the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975.
- The Stonewall National Monument in New York City tells of The Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar that was raided by police at least once a month in an era when homosexuality was criminalized, and why the six-day uprising of LGBTQIA+ protesters in 1969 was a turning point in the gay-rights movement.
Civil rights are guaranteed for all Americans but not always upheld — and national monuments, museums, or parks that honor the rights of many, including Native Americans and people with disabilities, are rare or nonexistent. However, the National Park Service (NPS) is making strides to preserve important and undertold stories.
In 2023, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the NPS will collaborate with Native American tribes on a theme study focused on the Indian Reorganization Period of 1934–1950. This will help identify potential future National Historic Landmarks.
People with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health, but their stories often remain untold. The NPS website features articles and publications exploring disability history interwoven across the service’s 400-plus parks, landmarks, and programs.
Still, there are no sites dedicated to the protests and sit-ins that led to passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. Yet every time you see a curb cut in the sidewalk, you can think of and be thankful for the ADA.
Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Jackson, Miss.
Begin your tour of this sobering and awe-inspiring museum in the light-filled central gallery. Listen to a rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” — and take in the massive light sculpture of the same name. This folk song became an anthem of the Civil Rights movement, representing the righteousness, resilience, and resolve activists leaned upon during their struggle for freedom; the light sculpture metaphorically illuminates a dark period in Mississippi’s history.
The museum’s other galleries guide visitors through the Black experience in the state, from the years of slavery through the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction; and from 100 years of Jim Crow through the Civil Rights movement to today.
16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Ala.
In May of 1963, more than 1,000 students gathered in this historic Black church before marching to downtown Birmingham to demand desegregation. Television coverage of the fire hoses and police dogs set upon the young protesters caught the nation’s attention, making the Children’s Crusade a turning point in the fight for civil rights. However, violence continued to plague the city as segregationists resisted efforts to desegregate Birmingham, and on Sept. 15, 1963, four girls were killed when members of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter bombed the church. A sculpture commemorating Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley stands across the street from the church in Kelly Ingram Park.
Robert Russa Moton Museum, Farmville, Va.
Once an all-Black high school, this museum is considered the birthplace of the student-led Civil Rights movement. In 1951, more than 400 students, led by 16-year-old Barbara Johns, went on strike to demand better educational conditions and amenities. The court case that followed ultimately was incorporated into the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., Supreme Court case.
Even after the Brown decision, however, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors kept its schools segregated, and in 1959 (after more court challenges) it closed its schools altogether and provided tax money to support private, white-only schools — denying African American students access to public education for five years.
This article originally appeared as “History Lessons” in the January/February 2025 issue of Experience Life.
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Great content Jill! We need to learn from other’s experiences. We should always love our neighbors (others) as we love ourselves.