Justice like a mighty stream

With yesterday's severe weather having moved east we could resume our journey across the state of Mississippi into the state of Alabama.

It was 90F in Meridian yesterday. Today the sun was shining but the temperature had dropped more than twenty degrees.

Our first stop today was in the city of Selma where we visited the National Voting Rights Museum (left)

After the Civil War, slavery was abolished and black men in the south were given the vote, but very soon the southern states enacted legislation that made it almost impossible for black people to register to vote.

It took the struggle of the civil right movement in the 1960s for black people in the south to have in reality, what was all along theirs in theory - the precious right to vote.

From Selma we drove to Montgomery, the capital of the state of Alabama, to visit the Rosa Parks
museum.

Rosa Parks (right) was the woman who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on Montgomery's segregated bus system. The 13-month bus boycott that followed was one of the key early events in the civil rights movement in the south in the mid 1950s.

The museum brilliantly recreated the events of that crucial day in American history, and with all that followed, in an amazing display of light and sound which included a full size bus. Sadly we weren't allowed to take photos.

Next we visited Dexter Baptist Church (left), close to the state capitol, where the young Martin Luther King was the minister.

Our guide was an amazing African American woman, who spoke with great vigour and passion, and had us all join hands at the end of the tour and sing 'we shall overcome...deep in my heart I do believe, we shall overcome, someday.'

It was a moment I shall long remember, and it reminded me of the two black women standing in the national mall at Washington on the day of Obama's inauguration as president (for the first time). The were holding up a hand made placard which simply bore the words: 'We have overcome.'

Martin Luther King's study at the church. His preaching gown is hanging on the wall behind

Dexter Baptist Church

Nearby was the Civil Rghts Memorial Center, commemorating more than 40 people who lost their lives during the civil rights struggle. Inside there were brief biographies of all those who had died. Outside was  the memorial, based on the words of the prophet Amos quoted by Martin Luther King: 'until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.'