Birmingham, we made it!

We landed at the airport in Birmingham, AL with 3 inches of snow on the ground and 34 degrees, with a smooth landing! We were greeted by Kim, our guide and Jackie our bus driver who brought us to our hotel only a mile away. 

We then met Pam and Reggie, our pilgrimage leaders for the week, from the Living Legacy Project which organized our pilgrimage.

The Living Legacy Pilgrimage is a journey to meet the people, hear the stories, and visit the sites that changed the world in the Civil Rights Movement. This experience starts in either Birmingham, Alabama, where the 1963 bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four little girls, Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley or Memphis Tennessee, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated and is now home to the National Civil Rights Museum. Each journey is custom designed for the needs of the participants and/or groups and typically run from four to eight days. 

The Pilgrimage is much more than a civil rights history tour. In addition to visiting historic sites, we meet veterans, many of them unsung heroes and foot soldiers of the civil rights movement. Additionally, we spend time exploring what today’s racism, white privilege, and barriers to equality look like in the towns we visit -- and in our own hometowns. As a spiritual pilgrimage, we reflect on what we experience together so when we each return home we can apply what we have learned to make a difference in today's world.

Reggie Harris helped introduce us to the meaning and purpose of the pilgrimage tonight. We start tomorrow with breakfast then on the bus, no later than 8:30am!