Tuskegee, AL
Where the Tuskegee Airmen learned to fly. Robert Russa Moton Field — named for Tuskegee Institute's second president — opened in 1941 as the primary flight training facility for the Army Air Corps' first African-American aviation cadets. Eleanor Roosevelt visited Kennedy Field nearby in March 1941 and famously took a flight with C. Alfred "Chief" Anderson, the chief instructor; her advocacy helped accelerate Moton's funding. Nearly 1,000 black military pilots earned their wings here from 1941-1945, training in PT-13 and PT-17 Stearman biplanes before advancing to Tuskegee Army Air Field for fighter training. The original Hangar #1 still stands and houses the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, operated by the National Park Service since 2008. The replica Red Tail P-51 in Hangar #2 reminds you what these students became — the 332nd Fighter Group, the only black flying group in WWII combat, with one of the lowest bomber-loss rates in the European theater. The 5,004ft runway is still in use as Moton Field Municipal.
You land on the field at Moton Field (KCQF), which is the whole point: this is where the Tuskegee Airmen learned to fly, and the original 1941 hangar is right there on the ramp, now the museum. Hangar #2 holds a Red Tail P-51 in 332nd Fighter Group colors; you can walk the parachute room, the cadet briefing rooms, the PT-17 Stearman they trained on, and the chapel. What the site doesn't soften is what training in a segregated military actually meant: white instructors who refused to fly with Black students, nearby towns that wouldn't put them up, and the constant weight of an "experiment" set up to prove Black pilots could fly combat. They flew it anyway.
Downtown Montgomery, Alabama holds the densest concentration of Civil Rights Movement sites in the U.S. At the corner of Dexter Avenue and South Court Street, the Rosa Parks Museum stands at the bus-stop site where Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955 — the act that launched the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott led by a 26-year-old new pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. Five blocks east on Dexter Avenue stands the brick Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where King preached his first sermon as pastor in 1954 and where the Montgomery Improvement Association (organizing the boycott) was founded. The Alabama State Capitol on the hill at the top of Dexter Avenue is where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as Confederate President (February 18, 1861) AND where the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March ended — Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, opened the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice 1.5 miles south in 2018; the memorial holds 800 hanging steel columns inscribed with the names of 4,400+ documented lynching victims by county. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where state troopers attacked marchers on "Bloody Sunday" March 7, 1965, is 47 miles west.
Sometimes called Georgia's "Little Grand Canyon," Providence Canyon is unique: it's entirely man-made. Poor cotton-farming practices in the early 1800s — clear-cutting and plowing right up to the property lines — caused catastrophic gully erosion that within a few decades had carved 16 canyons up to 150 feet deep into the soft Coastal Plain sediment. The exposed walls reveal pink, orange, red, and white sand layers laid down when this part of Georgia was an ocean floor 65 million years ago. A state park now protects the formation. The land at the rim is still essentially flat — pilots scanning the ground notice it as a sudden colored gash in otherwise unremarkable farm country.
East of Birmingham, a 2.66-mile paved oval sits in the Alabama woods; Talladega, the longest and fastest track in NASCAR, with turns banked at 33 degrees. From the air the banking is the tell; the track is not flat like a road, it is tilted up at the edges into a shallow bowl. It was built in 1969 on top of a former airfield, and the infield still has an airstrip. The tri-oval shape, the acres of parking, the grandstands stacked along the front straight; there is no mistaking it for anything else once you are over it.