Selma, Alabama

Spoiler alert:  As of the writing of this post, I have finished my tour of the South, a part of the country I had not been to before (other than New Orleans and North Carolina).  And of all of the places in the South I visited on this trip, I was surprised to discover that I liked Alabama the best!  Granted, I saw only two cities there, but I thought both were really neat and I got a good vibe from both of them.

The first was Selma, a small city in the middle of Alabama.  Although it's probably well-known for other things, a lot of people know about it because of the events of March 1965:  First the "Bloody Sunday" where 600 civil rights protest marchers were stopped on the town bridge and beaten with clubs and sprayed with tear gas; and second, for the successful march a few weeks later from Selma to Montgomery, where 25,000 marchers walked 50 miles to protest the lack of civil rights of Alabama.  If you remember the 1960s or took a history class, you'll remember that the Civil Rights Act was signed into law a few months later.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge

But Selma has more than just the famous bridge and a place in the history of the civil rights movement.  It's got a small and charming Old Depot Museum, with its collection of artifacts from all of Alabama's history (pre-Colombian era through the present).  It's one of those kitschy little places where the staff takes an enormous amount of pride in their work.  And the proprietor was happy to tell me about Selma and give recommendations for things to see and places to eat.

The Old Depot Museum

Detail of a quilt at the museum.

Most of the town (that I saw) was pretty blue collar, nothing too fancy.  The older part of the town, which I strolled around for a while, was pretty charming, but small.  For example, Selma's famous Songs of Selma park is only this big:

Yes, that's all of it.  I'm not sure what the big deal is, other than the great sign.  Don't get me wrong, it's cute, but um... where's the park?

I was pleased to find a couple of dining options with some real southern cooking.  My lunch was really tasty I was eating it, but I felt a bit queasy an hour later, probably because each item on my plate contained at least one stick of butter.  Yummy, but richer than I'm used to.

A lunch of butter, garnished with fish, fried okra, sweet potato fries, and hush puppies.  And sweet, sweet tea.

An interesting stop on my tour was the Brown Chapel AME Church, which was the starting point for the march from the aforementioned Selma-to-Montgomery march.  The church itself wasn't that interesting, except as a historically significant place in the civil rights movement.

But what made my stop interesting was there was one other person who stopped his car along the road to admire the church and its monument to Martin Luther King.  And this car was equipped with loudspeakers on the outside, blaring what sounded like a speech given by someone from the Black Power movement.  I really have no idea who it was, but it sounded like Stokely Carmichael or Malcolm X or someone, kind of talking up how the black man has been kept down by the white man and how he shouldn't put up with it anymore.  It sounded kind of old, like 1960s era.  Again, that's a guess, but an educated guess.  It felt like a movie, that as I was looking at one of the monuments to the civil rights movement, that some random guy drove up in a car to play for me my own personal soundtrack to my visit.  Wish I'd asked him what he was playing.  Ah, well.