Kelly Ingram Park

Great history on the audio tour. I went during the day and was able to finish the tour in about half an hour. A must in Birmingham.

This park is just across the street from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the 16^th Street Baptist Church! The park contains several pieces of sculpture related to the civil rights movement! If you’re visiting the Civil Rights Institute or the Church, definitely take at least a few minutes to wander around the park and take in its history and its sculptures!

This is a memorial park to remember Dr. King famous message across the street at Sixteen Street Baptist Church. It display the civil rights movement during that period of time.
The park has many bronze statues. It is well organized in the city of Birmingham. It statue represent the incident of the civil rights hard fought condition. You can observe it in the circle of the walk. The are flower and autumn tree planted in the park. During the foliage, the leave change colors and this park is beautiful.
During the weekend, the street parking is free. There many people visit here due the historic baptist church, civil rights museum and this park. The only downside is too many homeless lay down on the park bench. The city need to have the rescue mission able to host this people. I pray the have a place to go when winter approaches.

We visited Kelly Ingram Park after seeing the Civil Rights Museum. I think this order was helpful to ensure you understood who some of the sculptures or memorials were for. Walking around was just eery. It really gets you into the history. The sculptures really draw you in and evoke feelings of the past and present.
It’s a beautiful park but needs some TLC. The fountain in the center has leaks and hasn’t been cleaned in a long time. The signs for different city walks are peeling or faded. I hope the city puts some time into it because this park should never fade away.

Visiting this park was not on my list of things to do today but i was happily forced to do so because the civil rights institute was closed today. I am glad I was able to visit this outstanding tribute to the struggle of the people of Birmingham during the civil rights movement.

We visited the park yesterday afternoon after first visiting the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, all of which are on the same block. The park has many beautiful statues from the era depicted at the museum — and be sure you walk all around the exterior, because we almost missed a few of the statues.

Saturday, March 8^th, Tony and I was urban hiking in Birmingham and we visited Kelly Ingram Park across the street from the Civil Rights Institute and 16^th Street Baptist Church. Formerly West Park and home to so much violence during the Civil Rights movement and so full of HISTORY. a must visit when you are in Birmingham Alabama. so much INJUSTICE IN THE WORLD… Kelly Ingram Park, formerly West Park,[2] is a four acre (16,000 m²) park located in Birmingham, Alabama. It is bounded by 16^th and 17^th Streets and 5^th and 6^th Avenues North in the Birmingham Civil Rights District. The park, just outside the doors of the 16^th Street Baptist Church, served as a central staging ground for large-​scale demonstrations during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Reverends Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel, and Fred Shuttlesworth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference directed the organized boycotts and protests of 1963 which centered on Kelly Ingram Park.[3] It was here, during the first week of May 1963, that Birmingham police and firemen, under orders from Public Safety Commissioner Eugene «Bull» Connor, confronted demonstrators, many of them children and high school students, first with mass arrests and then with police dogs and firehoses. Images from those confrontations, broadcast nationwide, spurred a public outcry which turned the nation’s attention to the struggle for racial equality. The demonstrations in Birmingham brought city leaders to agree to an end of public segregation and helped to ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The park was named in 1932 for local firefighter Osmond Kelly Ingram, who was the first sailor in the United States Navy to be killed in World War I. In 1992 it was completely renovated and rededicated as «A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation» to coincide with the opening of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, an interpretive museum and research center, which adjoins the park to the west.

A nice park with beautiful statues and memorials with explanations and plaques across the street from the Civil Rights Institute. Well maintained it is a nice place to eat lunch after seeing the museum and neighboring historic church.

History really comes to life in this park (formerly called West Park). It’s a beautiful, moving tribute to Birmingham’s role in the civil rights movement, located right next to the Civil Rights Institute and the 16^th Street Baptist Church that was bombed in the 60s, filled with dozens of sculptures and statues. The park was the staging ground for many protests and boycotts in the 60s; this was where the police commissioner used water cannons and police dogs to deter peaceful demonstrators, and in fact if you look carefully you can still see that some of the trees have stripped bark where the water cannons hit. It’s incredible to think how far the city has come.