Civil Rights Memorial Center

Montgomery, Alabama

One our nation’s most important memorials dedicated to civil rights.

Created by Vietnam Veterans Memorial designer Maya Lin, the Memorial honors the forty-one people who died in the struggle for the equal and integrated treatment of all people, regardless of race, during the civil rights movement.  Adjacent to the Center is the Civil Rights Memorial Center, which includes the Wall of Justice.

The Memorial is just around the corner from the Dexter Avenue Church where Dr. King served as pastor with the goal of creating an organization that would achieve desegregation through nonviolent resistance.  The church was the backbone of the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott – the first locally-initiated mass protest against racial discrimination and a "model" for other grass-roots demonstrations.  

Martin Luther King, Jr., lived in the parsonage and on January 31, 1956, local segregationists bombed King’s home. At the time, King was at a meeting, but his wife Coretta was there with their ten-week-old daughter.  After King verified that both were unhurt, he addressed the angry crowd of African Americans outside. “Don't do anything panicky,” he advised. “I did not start this boycott.  I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop.” 

In February 1957, when King was alone in the parsonage with Morehouse College friend Bob Williams, something disturbed King.  He told Williams they should leave the parsonage immediately.  Several hours later, a bomb exploded outside the parsonage, crushing the front part of a house and shattering the windows of three parked taxis, injuring the drivers.  Only a few days after the bombing, police arrested seven white men.  Two of them admitted to the crime, but despite their signed confessions, a jury acquitted them.

Dexter Avenue Church, Montgomery, Alabama.