December 4: Montgomery, Alabama, to Pooler, Georgia

It was Saturday morning in Montgomery and there were very few people on the streets.  I stopped for a look at the first White House of the Confederacy and then at the State Capital building directly across the street.

Next I went  to the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University. The museum is located at the bus stop where Rosa Parks boarded the bus in 1955 on the day when she refused to give up her seat to a white man. The highpoint of the museum is a recitation of the events on the bus while you are standing in front of a stopped bus with videos in each of the bus windows showing a reenactment of the entire situation that unfolded.

I did not know that there had been four other women who had done the same thing before Rosa Parks. They too had been arrested. But no one had thought to call for a boycott of the buses before. And that was not Rosa Parks idea. The idea had been percolating for some time, but Jo Ann Robinson, a faculty member at Alabama State College, decided to make up flyers and call for a boycott the following Monday. Around 50,000 flyers were mimeographed overnight and were distributed by volunteers the next day.

The museum has many original documents from the time on display, including police reports and notes written by some of the participants. The boycott was extended beyond one day and was the event that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., then only 26 years old, into the public spotlight along with Rev. Ralph Abernathy.
While I was outside the museum in the nearly empty downtown of Montgomery, one of the city buses was parked by the museum. The city has evidently maintained this 1955 vintage bus as a reminder of the boycott and its results.

I left Montgomery and drove eastward, soon crossing the Alabama/Georgia border and then passing south of Macon on my way to Savannah. There were some pecan orchards along the back roads and some peach orchards as well. Also quite a few horse farms.  But it was a pretty dull drive.

I finally arrived in the vicinity of Savannah at dusk. Instead of going right into the city, I found a Microtel motel in the town of Pooler, about ten miles northeast of the city. I've discovered that the cheapest motels tend to cluster at exits from a freeway that are 2 or 3 exits away from the main exits. All of my experiences with Microtel motels have been very good.