Bus Trek to the Roots of the Fight for Civil Rights in America

Raleigh News & Observer staff writer Josh Shaffer reported on 'an education process on wheels.' It seems that back in 2001 a bus tour of the civil rights journey was started Bruce Lightner. David Prince, a leader of Raleigh's MLK (Martin Luther King) Committee had spent the previous three years pitching the idea to him.

The tour in the past has drawn riders from as far away as London, England and Quebec, Canada.

A moving part of the tour according to Lightner is "just to be in the presence of people like Booker T. Washington; just to be where they were making their contributions, it is really moving to most people.

Booker T. Washington, mentioned in the article, is the person who led the famous Tuskegee Institute starting in 1881, based on the lessons he learned from General Samuel Chapman who had Booker work as a janitor to pay for his college education at Hampton Institute. One of the leading minds that played a key role at the Tuskegee Institute was George Washington Carver, the person credited with developing the uses for peanuts that led to a better financial outlook for southern farmers.

The tour brings the riders, like modern day freedom riders, in touch with the most important aspects of the Civil Rights Movement of the last century.

Sites along the tour route are:

King Center in Atlanta: Established in 1968 by Coretta Scott King to honor her slain husband Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King's legacy in the non-violent Civil Rights struggle.

Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama: The Bridge where in 1965 a non-violent march was violently stopped by 100 Alabama state troopers using dogs and tear gas against men, women and children. The confrontation was aired on national news horrifying the American public.

Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama: This museum is dedicated to Rosa Parks a person who by refusing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery in 1955 ignited the non-violent civil rights movement in the United States.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama: The church where the Ku Klux Klan murdered four teenage girls in a bombing that shocked the nation.