Montgomery, Alabama has been at the crossroads of American history almost right from its founding in 1819. The state's capital city was also the first capital in the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War.
It's also considered the birthplace of the civil rights movement, as the site of Rosa Parks's 1955 bus boycott, the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and the scene of brutal police violence at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that led to the Voting Rights Act.