NYT, pg1: Civil Rights Battlegrounds Enter World of Tourism

Civil Rights Battlegrounds Enter World of Tourism
By SHAILA K. DEWAN

Published: August 10, 2004


ATLANTA, Aug. 9 - One of the great peculiarities of the South is the exhaustive celebration of its own defeat. Equestrian statues, battle flags and stolid historical markers commemorate seemingly every shot fired in the Civil War.

Now, the victories of another war - against white supremacy, Jim Crow and lynchings - are starting to get equal billing.

A surge of interest in the civil rights movement has dislodged lingering discomfort with the past, bringing new attention to the lunch counters, bus terminals and churches that were the movement's battlegrounds. Suddenly, events both major and minor are being memorialized; the projects under way range from full-blown tourist attractions to an attempt to name a Georgia highway for a black G.I. killed by Klansmen.

In Greensboro, N.C., the Woolworth where the sit-in movement began will become a museum. In Mississippi, Neshoba County published a civil rights tour guide this summer showing the site where three civil rights workers were killed 40 years ago. In Alabama, the National Park Service will break ground in March on the first of three visitor centers along the route of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march.

It has not been easy for communities to embrace a past laced with shame and violence. "Tourism has been forced on these places," said Jim Carrier, a writer from Montgomery, Ala., whose "Traveler's Guide to the Civil Rights Movement" was published by Harcourt in January. "It's not like they put out a sign one day and said, 'Come on down and see our civil rights history.' It's in response to people coming down here, lugging big history books, looking for these places."

The lure of tourism money has helped overcome the shame. More urgently, the approach of benchmark anniversaries, like the 40th birthday of the voting rights march next spring, has guaranteed a re-examination of the past, whether locals like it or not. Furthermore, economic development officials have begun to preach that acknowledging the past is necessary to show the world that things have changed....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/national/10tourism.html