Up and on the road we knew we had a couple of heavy days ahead of us. We started in Birmingham, also known for a long time as Bombingham due to the violence which erupted during the Civil Rights Movement. We visited the Civil Rights Institute which is situated across the road from the 16th Street Baptist Church where on on Sunday, September 15, 1963 as an act of white supremacist terrorism a bomb was detonated as a group of children met for the sermon entitled "The Love That Forgives". Four girls were killed between the ages of 11 and 14 years old. It was also here that Civil Rights Meetings were held by leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph David Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth.

Inside the museum you were able to hear more about the lives of those people living in Birmingham at the time and the passion and belief they had in their cause. One of the windows of the institute looked on to Kelly Ingram Park. It was on this site that on during the first week of May in 1963, a Birmingham police and firemen confronted demonstrators, many of them children and high school students, first with mass arrests and then with police dogs and firehoses. Images of these scenes were broadcast nationwide and caused a large outcry against the audrocities happening in Birmingham and else where in the South.

After feeling pretty deflated but equally inspired by the capabilities of humanity we hit the road and headed on to Montgomery.