MONTGOMERY, Ala. — With the firing of a cannon, the raising of the Stars and Bars and the singing of Dixie, people in antebellum finery will come Saturday to re-enact a most divisive moment in U.S. history: Jefferson Davis' inauguration 150 years ago as president of the Confederacy. There will be a parade to the state Capitol along Davis' 1861 route, a landscape that since has become the Jerusalem of Southern memory — sacred to both the Confederacy and the civil rights movement.
The procession will start near the spot where, in 1955, black seamstress Rosa Parks boarded a public bus and refused to give her seat to a white man, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott. It will go up the avenue where Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers completed the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. It will pass the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the first congregation King served as pastor, whose parsonage was firebombed in 1956 while King's wife and baby daughter were there.
And it will come within two blocks of the old Greyhound station where Freedom Riders, trying to desegregate interstate bus travel, were beaten bloody by a white mob in 1961 as police stood by.
"The ironies are rich," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, "and particularly ugly. This is a racist event, celebrating a government that stood on a foundation of slavery." Bernard Simelton of the Alabama NAACP likens the re-enactment to "celebrating the Holocaust."
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