LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Visitors to Louisville International Airport through March will have the chance to learn about and pick up a brochure for the self-guided tour of Louisville’s civil rights history in the airport’s second-floor Pegasus Gallery.
UofL’s Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research designed, created and recently revised the tour, which is offered with three partner organizations: the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage, the Muhammad Ali Center and the Louisville Convention and Visitors Bureau.
The Kentucky Center for African American Heritage also will have a display — about Mary Cunningham Smith, who was ejected from a mule-drawn streetcar — in one of the gallery’s glass cases along walls that are perpendicular to the top of the escalators. Greater Louisville Inc. offered the gallery display space where both exhibits will run Jan. 18-March 31, encompassing African American History Month in February.
The civil rights history tour features 22 stops, including UofL’s Freedom Park, the Muhammad Ali Center and the boxer’s boyhood home, activists’ homesites, churches, schools and the Fourth Street section that was the scene of mass protests for open accommodations in 1961.
The self-guided tour includes a driving map and a pullout walking map for the downtown Louisville sites, with QR codes, readable with a smartphone, that give access to additional historical information.
The tour map is available online at anne-braden.org/civil-rights-driving-tour-map/ The brochure on display at the airport this winter also is available at the Braden Institute, Room 258, Ekstrom Library; Muhammad Ali Center, 144 N. Sixth St.; Louisville Convention and Visitors Bureau, 301 S. Fourth St.; and Kentucky Center for African American Heritage, 1701 W. Muhammad Ali Blvd.
For more information on the driving tour, contact Cate Fosl, institute director and associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, at 502-852-2944 or check www.louisville.edu/braden. For more information on the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage exhibit, contact Lori Stahlgren, center curator-education consultant, at 502-583-4100.