Standing On The Promises

Linda Burton posting from Montgomery, Alabama – I stood on the star today. That’s the star the Sophie Bibb Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy placed on the spot where Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) stood when he was inaugurated President of the Confederate States of America on February 18, 1861. With one hand on the majestic white columns of the Alabama state capitol, I gazed down the marble steps it took me a while to climb; I looked further down the slope that’s still affectionately known as Goat Hill, because it once was pastureland for Andrew Dexter’s goats; I scanned the blocks on the street we know today as Dexter Avenue. Stand on that spot and you are standing in the pages of a history book. A block away the steeple rises above the modest red-brick church where Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968) was pastor from 1954 to 1960. It’s now known as the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church; the Montgomery bus boycott was organized here December 2, 1955. A few blocks more down Dexter Avenue is the Court Square Fountain, where Rosa Parks (1913-2005) boarded a city bus and refused to give up her seat to a white man, an act of civil disobedience at the time; a history-making choice. I’m in a history book all right, but civil war and civil rights are not the whole of it. There’s more. » read more