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From Primedia Publications
Two Revolutions: Montgomery, Alabama
History creates some ironic juxtapositions on the
streets of Alabama's capital city.

From the pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Kuther King, Jr., vowed to lead his people in their fight for equal rights.
Former Historic Traveler editor John Stanchak once suggested that only in Montgomery, Alabama, could you find a place where two American revolutions began a mere block apart. In 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis stood on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol and took an oath to lead the people of his new nation in a quest to defend their rights. Ninety-four years later and a block away, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., stood in the pulpit of a black church, vowing to lead his people in a quest to secure rights long denied them.

The Confederacy of Jefferson Davis embraced slavery as a historic fact and an economic necessity. But slavery proved to be a bed of shifting sand that, whatever other notions the South fought for, helped topple the rebel nation.

King understood the potent symbolism of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, home to a prominent black congregation and located one short block from the Cradle of the Confederacy. King, who'd been in town only a year, was chosen to lead the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, an event often considered the first major act of the modern Civil Rights-era drama.

The Alabama Capitol, filled with portraits, murals, and period furnishings, recently reopened following a painstaking restoration. Through its echoing halls once strode Governor George Corley Wallace, a banty rooster antagonist who often provided King with the perfect foil. Down the steps and to the left on the capitol lawn is a statue commemorating Dr. John Allen Wyeth, an Alabaman who rose from country doctor to president of the American Medical Association. Wyeth is equally well known for his excellent 1899 biography of controversial Confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a character still revered for his military exploits, despite being, as a Harper's book editor once described him, "the great evil bogeyman of the Confederacy." In honoring the noble physician with a statue, the state sends a coded message: we are good people, and we were right.

Lin's simple monument remembers something ended but hardly done.
If Dr. Wyeth stood astride the century between Jefferson Davis and Martin Luther King, Jr., his statue today gazes southwest to the Civil Rights Memorial that offers a coda to the years between 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregated schools, and 1968, the year an assassin's bullet cut down King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The Civil Rights Memorial stands in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a simple gray structure tucked under the long shadow of a new state office building ostentatious enough to suit a pharaoh. Designed by Maya Lin, who also designed Washington, DC's, Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, the Civil Rights Memorial bears on its water-laved black pedestal the names of 40 people murdered during the civil rights upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s. Lin's simple monument remembers something ended but hardly done. The Civil War is long over. The days of lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Riders recede behind us. But the issues of those historic struggles resonate in Montgomery and echo across America still.

The Montgomery Visitor Center is downtown at the corner of Hull and Madison, telephone (334) 262-0013. The Alabama State Capitol is open Monday-Saturday 9:00-4:00, closed Sundays and holidays, (334) 242-3935. The Dexter Avenue-King Memorial Baptist Church, 454 Dexter Ave., (334) 263-3970, is open Monday-Friday 10:00-2:00, Saturday 10:30-1:30. The Civil Rights Memorial, 400 Washington Ave., (334) 264-0286, is free and always open.
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