US Civil Rights trail to launch next year taking tourists from Birmingham to Selma to Memphis

A new tour will begin in 2018

The Edmund Winston Pettus Bridge is located to the east of Selma (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Travel South USA has announced plans to launch a US Civil Rights trail, taking tourists to landmarks of importance to the movement.

The tours will start on 1 January 2018, the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s decree that freed slaves in the South during the Civil War.

The trail will focus on the famous sites from the Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 1960s. These include the 16st Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama church, which was the site of a bombing by the Ku Klux Klan that killed four young girls on 15 September 1963 and the Selma bridge, another Alabama landmark where State police attacked voting rights demonstrators on 7 March 1965, which became known as "Bloody Sunday."

Travel South will also take people to Atlanta, Georgia, where visitors can tour the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was assassinated 50 years ago.

The tour will take visitors inside the Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina where four black college students occupied "whites only" lunch counter stools and launched the sit-in movement in 1960.­­

The company is also highlighting lesser-known landmarks that it believes are equally interesting, such as the parsonage in Montgomery, Alabama, which houses the wedding photographs of Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta Scott King.

Travel South president and CEO Liz Bittner said: “The Travel South member states were at the heart of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and ‘60s, a time of triumph and tragedy that redefined America.

“This multi-state trail will allow visitors to see, touch and experience the places that continue to inspire people across the world.”

Details of all 80 sites will be available on a dedicated website, civilrightstrail.com, later in the year.