A Civil Rights heritage trail RV journey

Most RV trips are vacations. This one is something else. The route from Memphis through Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Atlanta passes the geography of the American Civil Rights movement — the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Rosa Parks Museum, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the King Center. Treating it as a vacation flattens it. Treating it as a pilgrimage overstates the visitor's role. The honest framing is: a family with the privilege of moving freely through these places has a responsibility to read the history and to be quiet at the sites.

This piece is illustrative — composite, not testimonial. Real families who have completed this trip should write to support@pickrv.com if they want to publish.

Day 1: arrive Memphis, National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel (allow 4 to 6 hours; this is not a 90-minute museum). Day 2: drive Memphis to Selma, 220 miles, via I-22 to I-65 to US-80. Day 3: walk the Edmund Pettus Bridge — west to east, the direction the marchers walked on Bloody Sunday in 1965 — at the actual pace, not photographed. Day 4: drive Selma to Montgomery, 50 miles, Rosa Parks Museum and the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum (allow 5 to 7 hours combined; the Legacy Museum is the more difficult and the more important). Day 5: drive Montgomery to Birmingham, 95 miles, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (allow 4 hours). Day 6: drive Birmingham to Atlanta, 150 miles, the King Center and Ebenezer Baptist Church (allow 4 hours).

This is not a comprehensive list. Tougaloo College and Jackson, Mississippi are essential additions if the family has another two days; the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson is one of the strongest museums in the country and the marketplace that does not name it is the marketplace that has not been.

The Legacy Museum in Montgomery does not allow personal photography in the main galleries. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church requests a quiet posture during the docent's account of the September 1963 bombing. The Lorraine Motel preserves Room 306 as it was on April 4, 1968. None of these requests are extraordinary; all of them require attention from a family that arrives in a vehicle large enough to be visible.

An RV parked outside the Lorraine Motel is in a particular kind of moment. The motel is across the street from a working museum and a working memorial. Park down the block, walk in respectfully, and do not pose for photographs in front of Room 306.

RV camping in Memphis is straightforward (T.O. Fuller State Park is closest); in Selma it is limited (Paul M. Grist State Park is 18 miles north); in Montgomery there is Confederate Memorial Park, a state park whose name remains controversial and whose history is not the history this trip is centering; in Birmingham, Oak Mountain State Park is reasonable; in Atlanta, Stone Mountain Park is the most-known RV campground and is itself a Confederate-memorial site that the trip's narrative requires the family to grapple with.

The honest note: the campgrounds along this route are sometimes adjacent to monuments that this trip is in tension with. Naming this is the responsibility of the marketplace narrating the route.

We are writing it for every family considering the route, and especially for white American families for whom the route's history is inherited but not lived. The marketplace does not own the history. It owns the responsibility to point readers to the National Park Service Civil Rights Trail website, to the Equal Justice Initiative, to the King Center, and to the original primary sources. Everything else on this page is logistics in service of those resources.