Montgomery Now

Montgomery is a mid-sized Southern capital of roughly two hundred thousand people, the seat of Alabama government, and one of the most historically dense cities in the United States. On any given block in the compact downtown, the layers of American history sit within walking distance of each other.

The Alabama State Capitol, where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated in eighteen sixty-one and where Martin Luther King stood in nineteen sixty-five, still functions as the seat of state government. The Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church faces it from four blocks down the same avenue. The former Greyhound terminal where Freedom Riders were beaten in nineteen sixty-one operates today as the Freedom Rides Museum. The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opened in twenty eighteen, draw visitors from across the country and internationally.

The city's civil rights heritage is now one of its primary economic drivers. The National Park Service administers several sites in the area as part of the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. The US Civil Rights Trail, a multi-state network of sites, lists Montgomery as one of its anchors.

What the city has built around this history is unusual: an honest account, maintained in public, of events most American cities prefer to let blur. The Legacy Museum sits near the former slave warehouse. The memorial names the dead. The signs at the Greyhound station explain what happened there.

This particular square mile of Alabama has produced, across two centuries, some of the most consequential events in American political life, from the Confederate inauguration to the arrival of the Selma march to the court rulings that desegregated transit nationwide. The river is still down the hill. The history is still in the streets.