Inspired Southerner

We tell real stories about the South.

Inspiring Violins of Hope events come to Birmingham, Alabama to spread messages of hope

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Violins of Hope Inspired Southerner
Photo courtesy of Violins of Hope Project

I heard about the Violins of Hope about a year ago, but it wasn’t until I attended a presentation about the project two weeks ago, that I fully understood the significance it.   The culmination of all of the work to bring Violins of Hope to Birmingham comes together this week when four days of concerts, educational programs and interfaith dialogue surrounding historic violins played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust.  Yesterday, I got a glimpse of the events when I attended Karim Shamsi-Basha’s Hope, Harmony and History exhibit at the Levite JCC of Birmingham. [Read more…] about Inspiring Violins of Hope events come to Birmingham, Alabama to spread messages of hope

Walk in footsteps of the Civil Rights Movement with new tourism website

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Visitors to the South can now literally walk the sacred ground of the Civil Rights movement with new U.S. Civil Rights Trail website launched on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday.  Tourists will have the opportunity to tour areas pertinent to the Civil Rights Movement from the schools in Topeka, Kansas that were part of the 1954 desegregation case decided in Brown vs. Board of Education to the Lincoln Memorial, where the march for equality took place in 1963.

Civil Rights Trail Inspired Southerner
Civil Rights Memorial, Montgomery, AL photo courtesy of CivilRightsTrail.com

The trail allows visitors to experience places where blacks died at the hands of opponents to desegregation and which are scattered across the Deep South. The courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where in 1955, two white men accused of murdering 14-year-old Emmett Till walked free. This courthouse has been restored, as has the Jackson, Mississippi home where voting-rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963, just hours after President John Kennedy proposed major civil rights legislation. [Read more…] about Walk in footsteps of the Civil Rights Movement with new tourism website

We tell real stories about the south. ~Kara Kennedy, Publisher