OBSERVATIONS August 27, 2020

Frank and Nate Lassiter walked onto the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma, Alabama --- where in March 1965 almost 600 champions of minority voting rights began an historic five-day march to the state capital of Montgomery. Included in that delegation were the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and young John Lewis, who went on to serve many years as a distinguished African-American Congressman from Georgia up until his recent death at age 80.

A first-hand report from the editor

Lasting impressions from what turned out
to be a "Civil Rights Tour" of the Deep South

Son Frank at the Rosa Parks statue in Montgomery, Alabama. She refused to "move to the back of the bus" in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Montgomery is also home of the Freedom Riders Museum. Located in the former Greyhound bus station, the Riders were African-Americans who challenged the South's Jim Crow laws that segregated the races in just about every public accommodation.

In a city park in Birmingham are numerous statues commemorating violent confrontations in the 1960s between civil-rights marchers and policemen deploying attack dogs and high-powered water hoses.

Across the street from that Birmingham park is Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four young black girls were killed when white supremacists bombed the church on a Sunday morning in September 1963.

Grandson Nate, age 15, reads an historical marker erected on the grounds of an African-American country church where three civil-rights volunteers had launched a campaign for voting rights. The church was burned and the three were subsequently murdered. One of them, James Chaney, is buried in his family's plot outside Meridian, Miss. His headstone (below) has been toppled time and again by vandals, prompting the metal supports set up behind it.

Carrying on a family tradition that now spans four generations, I've been taking half-week road trips in recent summers with my son Frank and his son, Nathanael, a.k.a. Nate.

Usually, they've been Major League Baseball trips --- to Washington and Baltimore, Cleveland, and Cincinnati --- making stops along the way at all sorts of historic sites where Frank, a high-school history teacher in nearby Wake Forest, tells Nate and me stories from our nation's past that I'd somehow missed.

A baseball trip wasn't in the cards this summer, so I suggested a trip to some places in the Deep South I hadn't visited before, including the famous football universities of Auburn and Alabama.

Frank went to work on the itinerary, weaving in stops at key historic places. That carried us through Georgia to the infamous Andersonville Civil War prison grounds and cemetery, Jimmy Carter's boyhood home at Plains, Alabama's Tuskeegee Institute and the home of Booker T. Washington, and on to Montgomery, where we truly began what turned out to be our "Civil Rights Tour."

Actually, there's a "Civil Rights Trail" promoted by the visitors bureaus of several Southern states (including North Carolina) that reinforced the itinerary Frank had laid out for us.

Some of the highlights are illustrated in the photos shown here that I took at stops along the way.

One thing that struck me about the tour are the historical markers set up at all the important stops --- including several erected "off the beaten path" such as those that told the story of three civil-rights volunteers who were murdered in the backwoods of Mississippi in 1963. They were working for voting rights denied African-Americans --- a timely topic just now.

It took some doing to find some of those places, but Frank the geography student (it runs in the family), with help from his I-phone, made sure we found them all.

So where do we go from here? We didn't decide on that yet, but I'm looking forward to "going back to school" with these guys and touch the places where so much of our heritage took root.

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Visit Civilrightstrail.com>

A key spot on the Civil Rights Trail in North Carolina is Greensboro's International Civil Rights Center & Museum in the old Woolworth's store building where African-American college students in 1960 staged one of the nation's most celebrated sit-ins in protest of segregated lunch counters.

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