This page is sponsored by Freedom Lifted, which offers customized individual and group civil rights tours.
Run by an Alabama native, the trips are moving and meaningful. With experts organizing the travel details, you're free to immerse yourself in an unforgettable journey through history.
Click here to start your journey.
Guided and Individual Civil Rights Tours
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute plays host to tours regularly.
While, it's easy to tour civil rights sites on your own, there are reasons to take a guided trip. It lets someone else do the driving, and often provides extraordinary expert guides to help put the history and sites into perspective.
It's possible to customize a tour, and throughout the year community groups and colleges also offer trips to significant sites, usually on multi-day bus tours.
The following are just a sample:
- The Harford Community College in Bel Air, Md., which is northeast of Baltimore, has a bus trip planned for March 24-29, 2013. The tour visits sites in Georgia and Alabama.
Cost is $1,622 per person/double occupancy. Contact: 443/412-2175; lsturgill@harford.edu. Information here.
- The Chicago-based Freedom Lifted tour company offers separate bus tours of Mississippi-Memphis and Alabama-Atlanta.
For details, contact 773/ 359-4921. Information here.
- One of the most impressive tours is designed for teachers and students -- but occasionally individual travelers can join up too.
Sojourn to the Past, a California-based non-profit, has been giving tours since 1999 and has developed deep connections in the Deep South. The tours hit all the major civil rights sites from Georgia to Arkansas, and adds in some surprises too. Most impressive are the speakers the organizers arrange to meet each tour group, including actual participants in the historic events like Freedom Rider U.S. Congressman John Lewis and Elizabeth Eckford and Minnijean Brown Trickey of the Little Rock Nine.
It makes for a moving you-are-there experience that literally changes people's lives. Tours run January through May, although if you have a group, they can be arranged for anytime.
Contact info: sojournproject@gmail.com, 650/952-1510.
- The Montgomery County, Md., Office of Civil Rights offers a bus trip leaving from the Washington, D.C. area, and visiting Atlanta; Tuskegee, Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham, Ala., and Memphis, Tenn., before motoring back to Maryland.
Riders spend one night on the bus while they travel from Memphis back to Montgomery. In 2013, the dates are March 25-30, and while rates have not yet been set, last year they started at $495, sharing a room with four people. Those staying two to a room paid $535 apiece. For information, contact (240) 777-8450 or click here.
- The Civil Rights Historic Heritage Tour, sponsored by the Martin Luther King Resource Center of Raleigh, N.C. , is for the young or hardy, as it starts and ends with overnight bus rides.
It's a Freedom Ride of sorts with three buses, and a total of 165 passengers. The tour leaves from Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte, and includes three nights in hotels. You'll visit the most important Civil Rights sites in the South: Atlanta; Tuskegee, Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala., and Memphis, Tenn. All in all, the tour visits 14 historic civil rights sites.
In 2013, the tour runs April 2-5, and starts at $415, sharing a room with three other people. (It's $515 per couple staying two to a room). For info, contact (919) 834-6264, email brucelig@king-raleigh.org or click here.
- Solano Community College in California offers a comprehensive Atlanta to Memphis tour, and will likely accept travelers from outside the community. Along with expected stops in Atlanta, Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham and Memphis, the trip includes Tuskegee Institute; Jackson, Miss.; the Mississippi Delta and the B.B. King Blues Museum.
The tour runs June 20-28, 2013, and stars at $1,695 with four to a room, while a couple will pay $1,940 apiece for double occupancy.
For info, contact 707-864-7000, ext. 4428, email karen.mccord@solano.edu or click here.