African-American History

When Quentin Compson, from William Faulkner’s Absolom, Absolom! begins studying at Harvard University, his roommate, Shreve McCannon, asks him, "What is the South; What’s it like there, What do they do there, Why do they live there. Why do they live at all?" The book is Faulker ’s answer. Anyone born after 1970 is likely to ask, “What is the Civil Rights Struggle; what was it like then; who were the people involved in the struggle; what was the struggle like?” The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is one answer; www.bcri.org yet another. The Institute itself, like Faulkner’s book, contains the images, the symbols, the myths, the documents, the relics, the historians, and the people who present their own experiences, all of which deepen your understanding of The Movement in ways that facts alone can never do. Presented in a manner that places you amid events of the Movement, the exhibits and films of the Institute arouse pathos, here meaning the sorrow occasioned by unmerited grief. It is itself a symbol, across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park. The Institute traces the roots of Birmingham’s historical neurosis manifest during the Civil Rights Movement. WWW.BCRI.ORG is the interactive website that gives the world access to the documents, symbols, and people who comprise the Civil Rights Movement.

If places like 16th Street Baptist Church and Edmund Pettus Bridge; names like Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bull Connor, Medgar Evers, Emmett Louis Till, Rosa Parks, or the “Little Rock Nine”; organizations like NAACP, SCLC, the Ku Klux Klan, or SNCC; days like Bloody Sunday; words like “ Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” or “I have a dream!”; signs like “whites only,” “no niggers,” or “no colored;” decisions like Brown v. Board Education; bills like the Civil Rights Bill; or movements like the Sit-ins or Voter Registration mean nothing to you, log onto and search www.bcri.org!