Our time in Americus and Plains, Georgia -- meeting with people at Habitat for Humanity's Global Village and Koinonia, and attending Sunday school with Jimmy Carter -- prepared us well for the next stage of our journey, in Alabama and Mississippi, where we became immersed in the civil rights movement, folk art and architecturally innovative housing for poor people. It was a very full and rich course in aspects of Southern culture that were, in the main, new to us. So full was the course, in fact, that five galleries of photos were felt necessary to cover this segment of our trip. In addition to this gallery, which is dedicated almost entirely to the civil rights movement, be sure to check out the following: The Folk Art of Joe Minter http://nick.smugmug.com/gallery/98238; The Folk Art of Tin Man Charlie Lucas http://nick.smugmug.com/gallery/98254; The Folk Art of L.V. Hull http://nick.smugmug.com/gallery/98267; and (on architecture) The Rural Studio and Music Man http://nick.smugmug.com/gallery/98284.
APRIL 1, Birmingham. Photo of a statue of Martin Luther King and the historic 16th Street Baptist Church where mass meetings were held in the sixties, and where four innocent black girls were killed when the church was bombed in September 1963. The racially motivated bombing was the nadir of the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham and perhaps one of the darkest days in Birmingham's history. City authorities, never sympathetic to blacks, did very little to bring the bombers to justice. Not until 1977 was one of the bombers convicted. Locally, the bombing brought the factional Civil Rights leaders together. Nationally, it brought public outrage and attention to segregation.
APRIL 1, Birmingham. Photo of a statue of Martin Luther King and the historic 16th Street Baptist Church where mass meetings were held in the sixties, and where four innocent black girls were killed when the church was bombed in September 1963. The racially motivated bombing was the nadir of the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham and perhaps one of the darkest days in Birmingham's history. City authorities, never sympathetic to blacks, did very little to bring the bombers to justice. Not until 1977 was one of the bombers convicted. Locally, the bombing brought the factional Civil Rights leaders together. Nationally, it brought public outrage and attention to segregation.
