A photo book is usually a souvenir. The official companion volume to the U.S. Civil Rights Trail works harder than that — it's part archive, part travel planner, and a solid argument for building your next road trip around some of the most consequential sites in American history.
The trail itself launched in 2018, put together by activists, historians and state tourism offices. It links churches, schools, courthouses, museums and private homes across 15 states plus Washington, D.C. — all tied to the Black American fight against Jim Crow in the 1950s and '60s. The book, written by longtime Alabama tourism director Lee Sentell, runs 128 pages and pairs a timeline of marches, sit-ins, Freedom Rides and court cases with state-by-state histories. More than 200 of the photographs come from Art Meripol, a former Southern Living shooter whose work gives landmarks like Montgomery's Civil Rights Memorial real weight.
A few stops show just how varied the trail is. In Jackson, Mississippi, the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument preserves the house where the activist was assassinated in 1963, restored to how it looked when the Evers family lived there. Montgomery's First Baptist Church on Ripley Street served as a hub for the 1955–56 bus boycott and later sheltered Freedom Riders under siege — it still holds services. In Memphis, the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, traces 400 years of Black American history through films, artifacts and oral histories.
Some sites carry visible scars. The Daisy Bates House in Little Rock was the command post for the Little Rock Nine during the 1957 Central High School desegregation crisis — shots were fired into its windows and crosses burned on its lawn. Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate general, saw the 1965 Bloody Sunday beatings of voting rights marchers, footage that helped turn national opinion. And in Greensboro, North Carolina, part of the Woolworth's lunch counter where four students from North Carolina A&T launched the 1960 sit-in movement is preserved inside the International Civil Rights Center & Museum. Richmond's Virginia Civil Rights Memorial rounds it out with 18 bronze figures, including Barbara Johns, whose 1951 high school walkout fed into Brown v. Board of Education.
Why bother visiting in person? Because these places are spread across the South in a way that makes a road trip genuinely practical. The trail's website offers an interactive map plus downloadable driving itineraries for every participating state, so you can string together a weekend in Alabama's Black Belt or a multi-state Deep South route. The book is available at CivilRightsTrail.com and works well as pre-trip reading or a keepsake afterwards. Anyone interested in American history, meaningful road trips, or photography will get plenty out of both.
Story via Frommer's.
