Alabama State Capitol United States

Legendary

Martin Luther King Jr gave an impassioned speech here at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.

Photo by Ron Cogswell

There's a brass star embedded in the marble floor of the front portico of the Alabama State Capitol. It marks the exact spot where Jefferson Davis stood on February 18, 1861, and was sworn in as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.

Four days earlier, delegates had gathered inside the Senate Chamber and drafted a provisional Confederate constitution in under a week. Montgomery served as the Confederate capital for those crucial early months of 1861, before the government relocated to Richmond, Virginia in May.

The building had been completed just ten years earlier, in 1851, built in the Greek Revival style on a hilltop at the top of Dexter Avenue.

One of the building's most striking features is its interior spiral staircase, built by Horace King, a man born into slavery. King was later freed by his enslaver and granted the rights of a free man by a special act of the Alabama Legislature. He went on to become one of the most accomplished engineers and bridge builders in the 19th century South.

More than a century after Davis stood on those steps, the same building became the backdrop for one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement. The third Selma to Montgomery March for voting rights ended here in March 1965, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech to an estimated 25,000 people.

Less than five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, outlawing discriminatory practices that had prevented Black Americans from voting across the South.

The church where King served as pastor, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, sits directly at the bottom of the hill.

Walk the portico and find the brass star. Step inside to see the Senate Chamber where the Confederacy was born, the rotunda dome painted with eight murals of Alabama history, and the spiral staircase Horace King built by hand. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country's first memorial to victims of lynching, sits less than a mile away and pairs powerfully with a visit here.