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Georgia/Alabama

The Civil Rights Movement: Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham

Program No. 22657RJ

Journey through the Deep South to learn the history of the Civil Rights Movement and its defining clashes. Hear powerful stories of struggle and be inspired by resilient heroes.

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8 days

7 nights

17 meals

7B 5L 5D

Check-in, Registration, Orientation, Welcome Dinner

Atlanta, Georgia

Civil Rights Time Line, Atlanta Field Trip, Sweet Auburn

Atlanta, Georgia

Special Forum, Atlanta Capitol, Carter Center

Atlanta, Georgia

Montgomery, Rosa Parks, Church, Civil Rights, Freedom Riders

Montgomery, AL

Legacy Museum, Memorial of Peace & Justice, Sculpture Park

Montgomery, AL

To Selma, Edmund Pettus Bridge, Local Civil Rights History

Birmingham, AL

Civil Rights Institute, 16th St. Church, Kelly Ingram Park

Birmingham, AL

Departure Birmingham to Atlanta

Birmingham, AL

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At a Glance

Journey south into the heart of the civil rights movement to gain a deeper understanding of the historic and continued struggle for racial equality in the United States. Follow in the footsteps of the venerable Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his legendary marches, and hear the moving story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. Walk across the Selma Bridge with an activist who took part in the peaceful protest that devolved into unforgivable violence known as “Bloody Sunday.” Pay homage at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church as you learn the story of the victims of the 1963 KKK bombing. Study how these catalysts ignited a movement that would define this pivotal moment in American history.

Activity Level

On Your Feet

This programs involves walking up to two miles daily over uneven terrain. Standing for lectures in museums up to an hour. Some historical structures have stairs/no elevator.

Best of all, you’ll…

Commemorate the central figures of the civil rights movement on field trips to the Rosa Parks Museum, Georgia State Capitol and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site.
Follow the path of heroic marches through Atlanta and Birmingham and from Selma to Montgomery, now a National Historic Trail.
Learn from an activist who was a witness and participant in some of America’s most significant civil rights battles.

General Notes

Select dates are designated for small groups and are limited to 24 participants or less.

Featured Expert

All trip experts

Dianne Harris

Dianne Harris has received the Congressional Foot Soldier Medal and Certificate, as well as numerous other medals and awards for her ongoing fight for racial equality. She is an avid public speaker, appearing on NBC Today in 2015 and is often interviewed by newspapers, magazines and other media outlets for her unending vigil for justice. She remembers her involvement in the movement like it was yesterday. She particularly remembers listening to Martin Luther King and the events of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama.

Please note: This expert may not be available for every date of this program.

Tom Murray View biography

Tom Murray is a graduate of San Jose State University but is a Southerner by choice, having spent more than 45 years in the South absorbing the culture, customs and history of the region. Tom specializes in coastal history with an emphasis on the sea islands of Georgia. Few people know and love beautiful Cumberland and Amelia islands better than Tom. He has spent 25 years lecturing and leading Road Scholar groups to sites from the mountains to the sea.

Camilla Comerford View biography

Camilla Comerford is certified in leading educational adventures and has traveled throughout Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, and Ireland. Camilla also worked for almost 30 years in the commercial real estate business in Atlanta, Georgia and other cities throughout the South. She looks forward to sharing her love for the region with you!

Larry Spruill View biography

Dr. Larry Spruill is a graduate of the State University of New York system. It provided social programs which afforded disadvantaged students opportunities to experience upward social mobility. His academic career began in an upstate New York community college and introduced him to the rigors of higher education and facilitated his entrance into doctoral studies. He is a retired school principal specialist and instructor and currently a full-time professor of history at Morehouse College, Georgia. He also served as a foreign missionary, teacher and pastor.

Dianne Harris View biography

Terrie Dal Pozzo View biography

Terrie was raised in New Orleans and moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands at the age of 18. She became the youngest woman in the Virgin Islands to obtain a Coast Guard license to operate motor and sailing vessels. Terrie skippered sailing vessels, taking guests on journeys through the Leeward Islands, teaching them to sail and snorkel and educating them on island life. She later lived in Kitzbuhel, Austria and Perth, Australia before returning to the Virgin Islands. She currently lives in eastern Tennessee.

Denise Swain View biography

Denise Swain is a Southerner who loves sharing the culture, climate, and curiosity of the Deep South. Her hometown was the coastal region of Georgia, better known as the Golden Isles. Denise resides today in northern Alabama. Her passion is to keep stories alive while enabling participants to observe sometimes overlooked people and spaces. She is a certified exploration director and spent more than 40 years in the advertising industry. She now enjoys hiking, biking, outdoor concerts, and leading Road Scholar groups on educational adventures.

Anne Peery View biography

Anne Peery has traveled extensively in the Southeastern United States. She has served in various leadership roles including the Executive Director of the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation. Anne holds a B.S. in education from Mississippi State University. She has worked with a volunteer group making medical-grade PPE for first responders in the Big Bend region of Florida.

Suggested Reading List (9 books)

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You can find many of the books we recommend at the Road Scholar store on bookshop.org, a website that supports local bookstores.

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The Civil Rights Movement: Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham

Program Number: 22657

Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights

by Sheyann Webb-Christburg, Rachel West Nelson Millhouse, Frank Sikorand

Sheyann Webb was eight years old and Rachel West was nine when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965. He came to organize non-violent demonstrations against discriminatory voting laws. Selma, Lord, Selma is their firsthand account of the events from that turbulent winter of 1965--events that changed not only the lives of these two little girls but the lives of all Alabamians and all Americans. From 1975 to 1979, award-winning journalist Frank Sikora conducted interviews with Webb and West, weaving their recollections into this luminous story of fear and courage, struggle a

Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s

by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer

In this monumental volume, Henry Hampton, creator and executive producer of the acclaimed PBS series Eyes on the Prize, and Steve Fayer, series writer, draw upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and hundreds of ordinary people who took part in the struggle, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it. Join brave and terrified youngsters walking through a jeering mob and up the steps of Central High School in Little Rock. Listen to the vivid voices of the ordinary people who manned the barricades, the laborers, the students, the housewives without whom there would have been no civil rights movements at all. This remarkable oral history brings to life country's great struggle for civil rights as no conventional narrative can. You will hear the voices of those who defied the blackjacks, who went to jail, who witnessed and policed the movement; of those who stood for and against it—voices from the heart of America.

Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: A Saga of Race and Family

by Gary M. Pomerantz

A fascinating tale of two cities told through the rise of two of Atlanta's most illustrious political families...highly significant in what it reveals about ambition, hard work, success, and race relations.

Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror

by Equal Justice Initiative

Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror documents EJI's multi-year investigation into lynching in twelve Southern states during the period between Reconstruction and World War II. EJI researchers documented 4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 - at least 800 more lynchings of black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date. Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.

A Perilous Path: Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law

by by Bryan Stevenson, Loretta Lynch, and Sherrilyn Ifill

This blisteringly candid discussion of the American dilemma in the age of Trump brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear. Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these leading lights of the legal profession and the fight for racial justice talk about the importance of reclaiming the racial narrative and keeping our eyes on the horizon as we work for justice in an unjust time.

Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

by John Lewis and Michael D'Orso

The award-winning national bestseller, Walking with the Wind, is one of our most important records of the American civil rights movement. Told by John Lewis, who Cornel West calls a “national treasure,” this is a gripping first-hand account of the fight for civil rights and the courage it takes to change a nation. In 1957, a teenaged boy named John Lewis left a cotton farm in Alabama for Nashville, the epicenter of the struggle for civil rights in America. Lewis’s adherence to nonviolence guided that critical time and established him as one of the movement’s most charismatic and courageous leaders. Lewis’s leadership in the Nashville Movement—a student-led effort to desegregate the city of Nashville using sit-in techniques based on the teachings of Gandhi—set the tone for major civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. Lewis traces his role in the pivotal Selma marches, Bloody Sunday, and the Freedom Rides. Inspired by his mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis’s vision and perseverance altered history. In 1986, he ran and won a congressional seat in Georgia, and remains in office to this day, continuing to enact change. The late Edward M. Kennedy said of Lewis, “John tells it like it was…Lewis spent most of his life walking against the wind of the times, but he was surely walking with the wind of history.”

Politics, Civil Rights, and Law in Black Atlanta 1870-1970

by Herman "Skip" Mason, Jr.

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

by Juan Williams and Julian Bond

From the Montgomery bus boycott to the Little Rock Nine to the Selma–Montgomery march, thousands of ordinary people who participated in the American civil rights movement; their stories are told in Eyes on the Prize. From leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., to lesser-known figures such as Barbara Rose Johns and Jim Zwerg, each man and woman made the decision that somethinghad to be done to stop discrimination. These moving accounts and pictures of the first decade of the civil rights movement are a tribute to the people, black and white, who took part in the fight for justice and the struggle they endured.

Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement

by Tomiko Brown-Nagin

The Civil Rights movement that emerged in the United States after World War II was a reaction against centuries of racial discrimination. In this sweeping history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta--the South's largest and most economically important city--from the 1940s through 1980, Tomiko Brown-Nagin shows that the movement featured a vast array of activists and many sophisticated approaches to activism. Long before "black power" emerged and gave black dissent from the mainstream civil rights agenda a new name, African Americans in Atlanta debated the meaning of equality and the steps necessary to obtain social and economic justice. This groundbreaking book uncovers the activism of visionaries--both well-known legal figures and unsung citizens--from across the ideological spectrum who sought something different from, or more complicated than, "integration." Local activists often played leading roles in carrying out the integrationist agenda of the NAACP, but some also pursued goals that differed markedly from those of the venerable civil rights organization. Brown-Nagin discusses debates over politics, housing, public accommodations, and schools. She documents how the bruising battle over school desegregation in the 1970s, which featured opposing camps of African Americans, had its roots in the years before Brown v. Board of Education.

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The Civil Rights Movement: Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham

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At a Glance

Best of all, you’ll…

General Notes

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