Day 5

Breakfast at the B and BOutside the B and BThe 14th Capitol Photo!Close up of the Alabama state capitol building.Inside the Alabama state capitol building looking up the staircase (see us?).


MLKs church in Montgomery

Civil Rights Memorial Center
Civil rights memorial
The day began when we woke up at the Red Bluff Cottage bed and breakfast in Montgomery. We packed and then went to the capital building to take our 14th capital photo. We went inside and walked around the capital building for a while and then looked at some of the civil rights sights in Montgomery. First, we walked by the Dexter Avenue church where Martin Luther King Jr was pastor, during the Montgomery bus boycott. The civil rights memorial was a block away from the car, so Jennifer decided to stay in the car after feeding the meter. Dan thought that the memorial was just a monument. Oops. It was a granite monument, with water flowing over a quote from Martin Luther King Jr and some of the important dates in the civil rights movement chiseled into the granite. In the back of the building was an entrance to a memorial museum which was opened only a year ago. The memorial museum remembers the civil rights victims as well as other civil rights movements across the world. They have a room where names are projected onto a huge wall and slowly cascade to the floor. The names are put in by visitors who promise to help stop segregation. We put in our names and lots of our family and friends and Dan took pictures. The pictures of our names are on the blog (except for Jack: Dan did not get a picture of it, so we put Joe's instead!).
After the memorial, we went to the Rosa Parks museum. They reinacted her refusal to move from her seat and subsequent arrest. They also had displays of the bus boycott that started with Rosa.
After the museum, we drove to the town of Whitwell, TN, where the Paper Clip memorial is. We had to go to the local police station to pick up a key and tape recording describing the paper clip project. The memorial is an actual cattle car that was used to carry Jews to the concentration camps during World War II and the students collected paper clips from all around the world and put 11 million into the car to represent the innocent victims of the Nazi regime, including 6 million Jews.
We then drove to Chattanooga and stayed in the Chattanoogan hotel. Before dinner, we went outside to make sure that at least 3 stars were in the sky and then we broke Passover the way they do in Israel!