Top Things to Do in Montgomery

Pop in earbuds, hit "start," and a foot-soldier who marched from Selma talks you past the brick church where Dr. King rehearsed "How Long? Not Long." The app auto-plays as you near each stop. Stand beneath the marquee of the now-closed Empire Theater and hear Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" bleeding onto pavement.

A black-owned tour company collects you in a silver Suburban and drives the 3-mile loop most visitors never connect: the parsonage where dynamite shattered the front porch, the courthouse where Judge Johnson struck down voting barriers, the cemetery where Johnnie Carr lies beside Union soldiers. Between stops the guide passes a mason jar of sweet tea. Condensation drips onto original court documents spread across the seat.

A 14-seat pedal bar rolls along a converted barge that circles the 150-acre Riverfront Park lagoon. Riders crank bicycle chains while a bartender shakes mason-jar margaritas; river-birch scent drifts across the wake and a downtown mural of Hank Williams glints in sunset copper.

Six hours unlock the full constellation: the farm road outside town where sharecroppers first dared to register, Lowndes County's "tent city" site, and the final approach into Montgomery along the 54-mile Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail. Halfway, picnic on smoked-sausage sandwiches under a pecan grove while your guide develops a 1965 voter-registration roll with 1,800 names crossed out in red ink.

Cross county lines to Selma, starting on the Edmund Pettus Bridge where tire rubber still scars the asphalt from Bloody Sunday. Return to Montgomery via Route 80, stopping at the roadside field where marchers slept in canvas tents smelling of kerosene and fear. Finish at the church where President Johnson watched "We Shall Overcome" sung live on national television.

A lantern-toting guide in 1890s undertaker attire leads you past the fountain where a jilted bride allegedly drowned her groom, then into the tunnel beneath the old Empire Theater where stagehands felt cold fingers on their throats. Stories weave in Zelda Fitzgerald's teenage letters and the 1911 ax murder of a grocery clerk, told while you stand on the very sidewalk where blood soaked pine planks.