The Photography of Phil Cherner

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Photos from a civil rights tour, January 2009.

Central High, which in 1957 was a flashpoint in the struggle to integrate the nation's public schools, in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In 1955 14-year-old Emmitt Till traveled from Chicago to the the Mississippi Delta to spend the summer with family. He supposedly "got smart" with a white woman at this country store in Money, Mississippi and was lynched a couple days later by her husband. The husband and his accomplice were tried and acquitted of the murder in this courtroom, which sits of the second floor of a still-used courthouse in Sumner.

The gravesite of James Chaney, killed for his civil rights work in Mississippi in June, 1964

The bus station in Jackson, Mississippi, where Freedom Riders arrived -- and were quickly arrested--in 1961. It is now an architect's office.

The Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, and Brown Chapel AME Church, where the protesters gathered before the march to Montgomery in 1965.

Montgomery, Alabama:

Martin Luther King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in the shadow of the state capitol.

Note the street sign showing the intersection of Rosa Parks Blvd. and Jeff Davis Ave.

Birmingham:

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The "Children's Crusade" emerged from here in 1963 to confound Bull Connor and change America. A few weeks later Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley were killed when the church was bombed. Today a statue of Martin Luther King stands guard across the street.

The two schools, Monroe and Sumner Elementary, at the heart of Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas.