National Park Service visitor centers along the Selma-Montgomery March route
The New York Times reports: One of the great peculiarities of the South is the exhaustive celebration of its own defeat. Equestrian statues, battle flags and stolid historical markers commemorate seemingly every shot fired in the Civil War.
Now, the victories of another war - against white supremacy, Jim Crow and lynchings - are starting to get equal billing.
A surge of interest in the civil rights movement has dislodged lingering discomfort with the past, bringing new attention to the lunch counters, bus terminals and churches that were the movement's battlegrounds. Suddenly, events both major and minor are being memorialized; the projects under way range from full-blown tourist attractions to an attempt to name a Georgia highway for a black G.I. killed by Klansmen.
In Greensboro, N.C., the Woolworth where the sit-in movement began will become a museum. In Mississippi, Neshoba County published a civil rights tour guide this summer showing the site where three civil rights workers were killed 40 years ago. In Alabama, the National Park Service will break ground in March on the first of three visitor centers along the route of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march. -- Civil Rights Battlegrounds Enter World of Tourism (New York Times)