Alabama's Civil Rights Trail: An Illustrated Guide to the Cradle of Freedom (review)

the alabama review 228 Alabama’s Civil Rights Trail: An Illustrated Guide to the Cradle of Freedom. By Frye Gaillard. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. xxv, 345 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5581-4. Frye Gaillard’s 2004 Cradle of Freedom has become essential reading for an understanding of Alabama’s role in the Civil Rights movement. His 2009 publication, Alabama’s Civil Rights Trail, serves as an excellent companion piece—equal parts history and travel guide. The book’s strengths are many. Gaillard, a journalist by trade, writes with the skills of a natural storyteller, using an accessible, conversational style. From the opening pages, Alabama’s role as ground zero in the movement for civil rights is apparent. Gaillard contends that Alabama has done the most of any state to preserve its civil rights history, and after reading Alabama’s Civil Rights Trail, it would be difficult to disagree. Gaillard’s account offers far more than a guide to historic sites. Preceding each “What to See” section is a thorough account of that city’s role in the movement, beginning with the cradle of the movement itself, Montgomery. Martin Luther King’s work in Montgomery is well-known, but Gaillard gives a fuller account of Montgomery’s part in the early movement, beginning with E. D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, and Vernon Johns. The usual suspects—Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham—are well documented by Gaillard. Each city merits a chapter, with a detailed discussion of the major points of interest, such as the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park. What makes Gaillard’s book particularly fascinating, however, is that he includes little-known sites. In Montgomery, for example, Gaillard includes the hackberry tree that was planted in the crater created by the bombing of Pastor Robert Graetz’s home. The chapter on Birmingham includes a discussion of Boutwell Auditorium, which was the site of a Ku Klux Klan attack on singer Nat King Cole in 1956, as well as the site, in 1938, of the inaugural meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a biracial group devoted to progressive causes. Scattered throughout the book are numerous “sidebars”—such as Joan Baez’s recording of “We Shall Overcome” at Miles College and Malcolm X’s appearance in Selma just three weeks before his assassination. Gaillard’s chapter on the Black Belt is particularly valuable, given that area’s role as a catalyst for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Here, Gaillard’s account of Viola Liuzzo’s murder and the trial that followed has an eerie, fly-on-the-wall quality. For the growing number of tourists who make the pilgrimage to Alabama’s civil rights landmarks, Gaillard’s work is a gold July 2011 229 mine. In the Black Belt, Gaillard has identified not only those sites designated as historic landmarks, but unmarked and largely unknown sites as well. In Selma the author directs readers to Good Samaritan Hospital, where Jimmie Lee Jackson died after being shot by a state trooper. In Greensboro Gaillard provides a fascinating account of the Safe House Black History Museum, so called because its owner, Theresa Burroughs, offered her property to Martin Luther King when it was rumored that his life was in danger. King survived the night in Burroughs’s house, but was killed in Memphis less than a month later. Gaillard also provides a valuable look at Mobile, which is often overlooked in histories of the Civil Rights movement. Every site discussed in the Mobile chapter is also a site on the Mobile African American History Trail. In one of the chapter’s most fascinating vignettes, Gaillard discusses Africa Town, a small community founded near Mobile by the last slaves brought into the United States. There is also a moving account of one of Mobile’s most tragic moments—the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald, a young African American man whose death prompted a lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center that eventually bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan. Alabama’s Civil Rights Trail is a valuable contribution to the literature of the movement. As Gaillard has proven with prior books, he is a journalist who is a...