AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Two hundred and fifty years ago, America's founders signed the Declaration of Independence, launching a quest for life, liberty and happiness. NPR is bringing you stories about that quest in our series America in Pursuit. Today, a look at the southern city known as both the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of civil rights. NPR's Debbie Elliott takes us to Montgomery, Alabama.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: I'm standing on the top step of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery, where there's a star that marks the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy in 1861. A little over a hundred years later, Governor George Wallace stood in this same columned portico to take his oath of office and declare...
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GEORGE WALLACE: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.
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STEVE MURRAY: And just below that is where the Selma-to-Montgomery march culminates and Dr. King gives his speech about the moral arc of the universe.
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MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: How long?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: How long?
KING: Not long.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Not long.
KING: Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yes, sir.
MURRAY: I'm Steve Murray. I'm director at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery.
ELLIOTT: Murray says the proximity of history-changing moments in Montgomery is extraordinary.
MURRAY: Block for block, in terms of kind of the process of figuring out how we're going to create this nation and what it means to become a more perfect union.
ELLIOTT: Montgomery is central to so many of the nation's inflection points, dating to 1861, when Southern delegates gathered in the Alabama state capitol to draw up the constitution of the Confederate States of America, a founding document that codified the right to own slaves. Within blocks of the capitol, there's the church where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. started his career, a circle that was once a busy slave market and the spot where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat.
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ROSA PARKS: The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed, I suppose.
ELLIOTT: That's Rosa Parks in an interview with Berkeley radio station KPFA explaining why she was willing to be arrested rather than yield her seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955.
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PARKS: I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.
ELLIOTT: Her arrest led to a mass meeting where Black citizens voted to boycott Montgomery buses, a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.
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KING: We are not wrong in what we are doing.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Inaudible).
KING: If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah.
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DORIS DOZIER CRENSHAW: It was electric.
ELLIOTT: Doris Dozier Crenshaw was 12 years old at the time.
CRENSHAW: I remember being excited about Dr. King and his speech and the willingness of all of us to stay off those buses.
ELLIOTT: Staying off the bus has meant long walks to school for children like herself.
CRENSHAW: The stage was set for what we called the work for freedom for our people. And I think we're still striding toward freedom.
ELLIOTT: Today, she leads a youth engagement initiative in Montgomery's historically Black Centennial Hill neighborhood. Next door is the parsonage where King lived with his family. Two doors down the other way is the Harris home, where Valda Harris grew up.
VALDA HARRIS: I can really sense that I became that civil rights activist at the age of 8.
ELLIOTT: Her home was a safe house and a place for civil rights leaders to strategize. For generations, Harris says, her family has been active in the fight for social justice. Her father was a Tuskegee Airman and a pharmacist who turned his drugstore into a transportation hub during the bus boycott.
HARRIS: His responsibility was dispatching the cars for pickup and delivery, and he was wearing his headset while he's filling prescriptions at the same time he's dispatching these cars.
ELLIOTT: She recalls a solidarity of purpose during those seminal civil rights struggles. The boycott lasted over a year until the U.S. Supreme Court found segregated public buses unconstitutional. A decade later, marchers from Selma to Montgomery galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, outlawing barriers that kept Black voters from the polls. Harris takes pride in Montgomery's role in American history, but says she feels like the country is going backwards as it marks its founding.
HARRIS: In my heart, I don't feel like celebrating 250 years.
ELLIOTT: Now 78, Harris worries about a resurgence of white supremacy.
HARRIS: Everything that's going on now, we've already been through. We have been through the hate. We suffered the hate. If you're not from Alabama, you have no clue. Growing up with the White Citizens' Council, growing up with the certification, this leadership. You know, this white supremacy is - was very strong, extremely strong.
ELLIOTT: Twenty-nine-year-old Khadidah Stone is part of a new generation working to protect hard-fought civil rights gains. She's one of the Alabama voters who sued to get a new congressional district designed to give Black voters representation.
KHADIDAH STONE: I just knew that, like, I was doing something right for the people and something that I wanted to make known to Alabamians - that you have a voice.
ELLIOTT: Stone says there's power in the story of how Montgomery changed America, but warns her generation needs to engage so that history does not repeat.
STONE: We're in a civil rights movement itself right now. Families are being ripped apart. What's going on with ICE is, you know, ICE is able to mask, hide their faces, take people away. It's very similar to what was happening pre-Civil Rights Movement with what you would call slave catchers. It's a very similar thing.
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ELLIOTT: Americans need to consider the long view of how we got here, says attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. He wants people to reflect more deeply on the legacies of slavery and the brutal Jim Crow era.
BRYAN STEVENSON: And if we want to acknowledge that, if we want to understand it, there's no place, in my view, more significant in that story than Montgomery, Alabama.
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ELLIOTT: Stevenson walks through Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, wedged between the railroad and the banks of the Alabama River.
STEVENSON: The river, of course, was a main portal for trafficking enslaved people in the 19th century, and the rail line made Montgomery one of the most prominent slave-trading spaces in America.
ELLIOTT: It's a leafy, contemplative space filled with artifacts like a cramped slave holding pen and vivid sculptures depicting enslaved families in shackles. Stevenson says this park and other public spaces EJI has created here are an attempt to change the narrative at a time when those in political power are trying to curtail the national conversation about racial injustice.
STEVENSON: We will not get where we're trying to go in this country if we don't have the courage to face this history. I talk about slavery and lynching and segregation not because I want to punish America or shame America. I want to liberate us. I really do think there's something better waiting for us. I think there's something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice, and it's waiting for us.
ELLIOTT: But Stevenson says getting there means confronting the things that hold America back. Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Montgomery, Alabama.
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