What can Montgomery Alabama teach Americans about Civil Rights?

0:00We decided that we were not going to take segregated buses any longer. And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.

0:22Debbie Elliot:Those voices you just heard, they're the soundtrack of the fight for and against civil rights in America. Martin Luther King Jr., Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace, and Rosa Parks, the woman who, with a simple act of civil disobedience, energized the movement with the Montgomery bus boycott back in 1955. In fact, Montgomery was the setting for much of the battle for civil rights. As the country celebrates its 250th anniversary, NPR's Debbie Elliott went to Montgomery to see what it can teach us. We will not get where we're trying to go in this country. if we don't have the courage to face this history.

1:00I talk about slavery and lynching and segregation not because I want to punish America. I want to liberate us. I think there's something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, and it's waiting for us.

1:12Debbie Elliot:Consider this. The landscape of Montgomery, Alabama, is a monument to civil rights, but is America losing touch with the lessons of that movement? From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.

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1:58Debbie Elliot:It's Consider This from NPR. Montgomery, Alabama isn't just known for civil rights. A city that was home to a thriving slave trade and a stronghold for Jim Crow is also known as the cradle of Confederacy, but also where Martin Luther King Jr. spent some of his early years as a pastor. NPR's Debbie Elliott takes us to Montgomery, Alabama, a city steeped in the complexities of American history. I'm standing on the top step of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery, where there's a star that marks the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy in 1861. A little over 100 years later, Governor George Wallace stood in this same columned portico to take his oath of office and declare.

2:46Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever. And just below that is where the Selma Montgomery march culminates. And Dr. King gives his speech about the moral arc of the universe. How long? Not long. Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I'm Steve Murray. I'm director at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. Murray says the proximity of history-changing moments in Montgomery is extraordinary. Block for block in terms of kind of the process of figuring out how we're going to create this nation and what it means to become a more perfect union.

3:31Montgomery is central to so many of the nation's inflection points, dating to 1861 when Southern delegates gathered in the Alabama state capitol to draw up the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, a founding document that codified the right to own slaves. Within blocks of the Capitol, there's the church where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. started his career, a circle that was once a busy slave market and the spot where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed, I suppose. That's Rosa Parks in an interview with Berkeley radio station KPFA, DPFA, explaining why she was willing to be arrested rather than yield her seat to a white passenger on December 1st, 1955.

4:23I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest led to a mass meeting where black citizens voted to boycott Montgomery buses, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. We are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. It was electric. Doris Dozier Crenshaw was 12 years old at the time. I remember being excited about Dr. King and his speech and the willingness of all of us to stay off those buses. Staying off the buses meant long walks to school for children like herself.

5:13The stage was set for what we call the work for freedom for our people, and I think we're still striding toward freedom. Today, she leads a youth engagement initiative in Montgomery's historically black Centennial Hill neighborhood. Next door is the parsonage where King lived with his family. Two doors down the other way is the Harris home where Valda Harris screw up. Yeah, I can really sense that I became that civil rights activist at the age of eight. Her home was a safe house and a place for civil rights leaders to strategize. For generations, Harris says, her family has been active in the fight for social justice.

5:52Her father was a Tuskegee airman and a pharmacist who turned his drugstore into a transportation hub during the bus boycott. His responsibility was dispatching the cars for pickup and delivery. He was wearing his headset while he's filling prescriptions at the same time he's dispatching these cars. She recalls a solidarity of purpose during those seminal civil rights struggles. The boycott lasted over a year until the U.S. Supreme Court found segregated public buses unconstitutional. A decade later, marchers from Selma to Montgomery galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, outlawing barriers that kept black voters from the polls.

6:34Harris takes pride in Montgomery's role in American history, but says she feels like the country is going backwards as it marks its founding. In my heart, I don't feel like celebrating 250 years. Now 78, Harris worries about a resurgence of white supremacy. Everything that's going on now, we've already been through. We have been through the hate. We have suffered the hate. If you're not from Alabama, you have no clue. Growing up with the White Citizens Council, growing up with the segregationist leadership, you know, this white supremacy was very strong, extremely strong. 29-year-old Kadida Stone is part of a new generation working to protect hard-fought civil rights gains.

7:22She's one of the Alabama voters who sued to get a new congressional district designed to give black voters representation. I just knew that I was doing something right for the people and something that I wanted to make known to Alabamians. That you have a voice. Stone says there's power in the story of how Montgomery changed America, but warns her generation needs to engage so that history does not repeat. We're in a civil rights movement itself right now. Families are being ripped apart. What's going on with ICE is, you know, ICE is able to mask, hide their faces, take people away. It's very similar to what was happening pre-Civil Rights Movement with what you would call slave catchers.

8:07It's a very similar thing.

8:13Americans need to consider the long view of how we got here, says Attorney Brian Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. He wants people to reflect more deeply on the legacies of slavery and the brutal Jim Crow era. And if we want to acknowledge that, if we want to understand that, there's no place, in my view, more significant in that story than Montgomery, Alabama.

8:41Stevenson walks through Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, wedged between the railroad and the banks of the Alabama River. The river, of course, was a main portal for trafficking enslaved people in the 19th century, and the rail line made Montgomery one of the most prominent slave trading spaces in America. It's a leapy contemplative space filled with artifacts like a cramped slave holding pen and vivid sculptures depicting enslaved families in shackles. Stevenson says this park and other public spaces EJI has created here are an attempt to change the narrative at a time when those in political power are trying to curtail the national conversation about racial injustice.

9:26We will not get where we're trying to go in this country if we don't have the courage to face this history. I talk about slavery and lynching and segregation not because I want to punish America or shame America. I want to liberate us. I really do think there's something better waiting for us. I think there's something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, and it's waiting for us. But Stevenson says getting there means confronting the things that hold America back. Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Montgomery, Alabama.

9:56Debbie Elliot:This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlom. It was edited by Rose Friedman and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers. Thank you.