(Akiit.com) The Society of Architecture Historians Conducts Historic Tour…
The Society of Architectural Historians is holding a four-day study tour from October 8-12 featuring the architecture, urbanism, and commemorative landscapes associated with the civil rights movement in Alabama and Georgia.
The tour, conducted by university professors such as Dell Upton from UCLA, will begin in Atlanta, Georgia with a visit to the first and final homes of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Stops will include Auburn Avenue, the black business district of Atlanta in the early twentieth century and the location of the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site. It includes Dr. King’s birthplace, Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he shared a pulpit with his father, and the King Center, site of his tomb, Jr.
The next day there will be tour of the Atlanta University Center, the world’s largest consortium of African American private institutions of higher education, that includes Spelman, Morehouse, and Morris Brown. The neighborhood includes the Alonzo Herndon mansion, Ralph David Abernathy’s church, and Booker T. Washington High School, which Dr. King attended. The tour then proceeds to Tuskegee University, much of which was designed by pioneering African-American architect Robert R. Taylor.
In Montgomery, Alabama the tour will visit Dexter Avenue-King Memorial Baptist Church, an architecturally significant 19th-century structure pastored by Dr. King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. Nearby are the Civil Rights Memorial (Maya Lin, 1989); the Dexter Avenue parsonage, where King lived during his Montgomery years; and the Greek Revival state capitol with its flamboyant Confederate Memorial. Other historic sites visited include the Viola Liuzzo Memorial in Selma and many other moving, historic sites in that crucible of the Civil Rights Movement.
In Birmingham, one of the South’s most prosperous and most rigidly segregated industrial cities in the twentieth century attention will be paid to its historical racial geography, including the early twentieth-century middle-class black suburb of Smithfield; Dynamite Hill, Sloss Furnace, a National Historic Landmark, Kelly Ingram Park, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
For further details and tour registration please visit www.sah.org or contact Kathy Sturm, Manager, Meetings-Fellowships-Tours at ksturm@sah.org, 312 543 7243.