Take a journey through the heart of America's civil rights movement

It was May 3, 1963. More than a thousand Birmingham students skipped school - just as they had the day before - to protest segregation. Only this day was different. The city's commissioner for public safety, Bull Connor, ordered the police to use force to disperse them. They turned fire hoses and their dogs on children, some as young as seven years old, arrested them and locked them up. Some would be released and back to the streets they'd go. It went on for a week, as the world looked on in horror.

"I was 12 when I ended up going to jail," says Nadine Smith. "I didn't go into the city jail because I was too young. They took us to the fairgrounds where they put us in things that looked like animal pens.

"We sang songs. We weren't afraid to be there. On about the seventh day, they finally gave us a telephone and told us to make our one phone call. We were supposed to call our parents to tell them to come and get us. We didn't. When we got the telephone most of us were like, 'I need a toothbrush and a change of underwear.' They snatched the phones from us."

Nadine and other former marchers now spend some of their time at the Birmingham Civil Rights Activist Committee Footsoldiers Headquarters. Meeting some of the "foot soldiers" is just one of the ways visitors to Birmingham today can trace the history of civil rights in the south.

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Right through the downtown area and historically Black neighbourhoods, more than a hundred trail markers provide information about the civil rights movement and its leaders. There's the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Masonic Temple, former home of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). St Paul's United Methodist Church is where the Reverend Dr Joseph Lowery founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr Martin Luther King. In 2017, President Barack Obama proclaimed the four city blocks on which these key sites are situated the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.

It's hard to believe in the modern, bustling Birmingham of today that the city, along with everywhere else in Alabama, was segregated until the late 60s.

The fight for equal rights didn't start in downtown Birmingham, but in the neighbourhood of Collegeville. From 1956, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth led the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights from Bethel Baptist Church. When, in November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses illegal - a year after Rosa Parks refused to vacate her seat - he decided to mark the occasion.

"Reverend Shuttlesworth told his congregation that the day after Christmas, guess what, we're going to ride the bus in an integrated fashion," says Martha Bouyer, who's now educational coordinator at Bethel. "And you always let the press know what you were going to do."

Bethel Bible Baptist Church was bombed three times. The first? Christmas night, 1956. Reverend Shuttlesworth was in his bedroom, reading his Bible. Friends were visiting and the children were playing in the living room.

"Reverend Shuttlesworth was actually blown up into the air," continues Martha. "And when he came back down, there was a huge crater left by the bomb. Once he realised he wasn't hurt, he started gathering up his family."

The pastor had been reading in his underwear and, as he climbed out of the rubble, he grabbed a coat that was still hanging on its hook. Somehow, no one in the parsonage was injured, and followers took it as a sign from God. The next morning, in borrowed clothes, Reverend Shuttlesworth and 200 of his congregants went downtown.

"He did exactly what he said," says Martha, during a tour of the rebuilt Bethel Bible Baptist Church, next door to the outline of the one that was finally razed by a blast in 1962. "He never asked anybody to do anything he was not willing to do. If he said, 'Let's ride the bus,' he's riding the bus. 'Let's integrate schools.' He's the first to bring his family. And, really, that's how this got started."

It was Reverend Shuttlesworth's work that brought Dr Martin Luther King Jr to Birmingham, where mass meetings were held at the 16th Street Baptist Church. But when adults stopped protesting for fear of losing their jobs (or worse), the movement stagnated. It was then Reverend James Bevel organised for groups of children to march to City Hall, lunch counters and downtown shops.

The Children's March lasted for eight days. People outside Alabama were so shocked, President John Kennedy began establishing new federal civil rights legislation. The movement was reinvigorated in the south, although change was slow and sometimes non-existent. Just months after the Children's March, on September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed killing four young girls at Sunday School.

Getting there: Qantas flies from Sydney to Dallas connecting with partner American Airlines to Birmingham, Alabama.

Staying there: Hampton Inn & Suites Birmingham-Downtown-Tutwiler was built in 1914 to get the Iron and Steel Institute to hold its convention in Birmingham. It's believed the ghost of Colonel Edward Tutwiler manifests on the sixth floor. The hotel is around the corner from the Birmingham Museum of Art and a short walk from the Civil Rights District. Rooms start at about $220 a night. hilton.com

Explore more: bcri.org; birminghamal.gov

The writer was a guest of Travel South and Alabama Travel.

Pictures: Shutterstock; supplied