Open Eyes Travel

If in your travels you experience a place or event you think would interest other racial justice advocates, send a photo with a brief explanation and perhaps we'll post it on the website's "Open Eyes Travel".  The email address is [email protected].

From the National Civil Rights Museum of Memphis School's Out by Allan Rohan Crite in the Smithsonian American Museum of Art.  Crite thought of himself as an artist-reporter whose assignment was to capture the daily lives of ordinary people. Memphis wall mural...

"Beale Street, just south of the main commercial and political thoroughfares of white Memphis, was at the heart of African American life and culture in the city.  Beale was home to businesses that catered to black Memphians and served as a haven from the often hostile...

In February, 1968, 1300 Black sanitation workers of the city went on strike to protest dangerous working conditions (two workers had been crushed by a faulty collection truck) and calling for an end to racial discrimination.   Their rallying slogan, "I Am a Man" spoke...

The Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated is now the National Civil Rights Museum.  The first exhibit room is titled "A Culture of Resistance" and begins with this: "Slavery in America lasted nearly 250 years and held captive at least 12...

No where has the role of children in the Civil Rights movement been more poignantly demonstrated than in Birmingham.  The Sept. 1963 bombing of the 16th St Baptist Church which killed Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robinson and Cynthia Wesley shocked and...

Our first stop was the 16th Street Baptist Church, infamous for the bombing by KKK members that killed 4 young girls who were there for Sunday School that morning.  The Church was targeted because it had become a meeting center for civil rights activists and...

Borrowing from a statement in the Mothers of Gynecology brochure, I have found in Alabama a strange dichotomy as the state claims status both as the 'Cradle of the Confederacy' and the 'Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement'.  Certainly, in Montgomery there are...

This beautiful sculpture created by artist Michelle Browder honors three of the enslaved women who were used by the man called the "Father of Gynecology"  without anesthesia (or consent) to test his theories for a procedure to repair fistula, a severe complication...

Less than an hour from Montgomery, Selma was an easy drive to get to but a sad sight to see once there.  It looks like a city America has abandoned and forgotten with its many empty storefronts and decrepit buildings along the main road.   Though the people we spoke...