Visiting My 50th State – Alabama!

When I realized I had been to all but two states, I knew I had to complete all 50 by July 4, 2026 for my own personal celebration of the U.S. Semiquincentennial. In October 2025, I made it to North Dakota, leaving one final destination — Alabama! That’s right, the first alphabetically was the last chronologically. Here’s a glimpse into my visit…

The first weekend in March is the Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee, so I built my travel plans around this date, and I was delighted that my friend, Anita, was enthusiastic to join me. The annual gathering commemorates the 1965 Bloody Sunday attack on civil rights advocates as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge to support voting rights. This podcast provides a succinct history of the event. I was fortunate to participate with the ACLU, an organization that continues to fight for voting rights.

Speakers included Al Sharpton, Pete Buttigieg, governors, state attorneys general, Congressional representatives, and descendants of MLK and Jessie Jackson. I was particularly moved to hear from a woman who crossed the bridge on Bloody Sunday at age 15 and to join thousands of voices singing This Little Light of Mine. It was a meaningful experience, and I’m so glad I was able to participate.

In Montgomery, I went to the Legacy Sites a museum, memorial, and sculpture garden where I deepened my knowledge and experience of slavery, racial terrorism, and their current reverberations.

The museum offered a wealth of information, as well as movies, stories, and art, making the experience highly accessible and educational. I was struck by the currency of some historical events — the continuation and impact of the domestic slave trade long after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished, lynchings that took place into the 1950’s, and the prohibition of the death penalty for minors being decided by a Supreme Court decision only in 2005.

It was particularly emotional to find evidence of a lynching in my hometown of Charlottesville, VA. The National Monument to Freedom, engraved with 122,000 surnames recorded in the 1870 census by 4.7 million people who survived the horrors of slavery, nearly brought me to my knees.

The Legacy Sites are a tremendous experience that I highly recommend.

On my final day, I visited the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. I stood on the steps of the state capitol building where the confederacy was founded and where MLK gave a speech at the culmination of the march from Selma that inspired the passage of the voting rights act.

I drove to Birmingham and paid my respects at the 16th Street Baptist Church where a bombing killed four Black girls in 1963, and I visited sites where Freedom Riders and lunch counter activists helped to integrated the city and changed the course of history. For a final view of the city, I drove up to Vulcan Park where a statue of the Roman god pays homage to the city’s history of iron.