Montgomery City Leaders Announce New Garden in West Montgomery
A street corner in Montgomery that is a part of the city’s civil rights history is getting a spruce-up.
Mayor Steven Reed, the Montgomery Clean City Commission and others are announcing the new “St. Jude Sculptural Corner Garden.” It’s at the corner of Oak Street and West Fairview Avenue.
The garden is designed to beautify that part of the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights Trail and the Oak Street Corridor.
“We want to tie all of these things into the federal funding that we got from Congresswoman Terri Sewell around the removal of blight and how we reimagine not only this corridor, but the entire area and what’s known as West Montgomery,” Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed said.
“It symbolizes what people marched for, for the freedoms that we have today and for some of the freedoms that we are still fighting for,” Montgomery city community development director Desmond Wilson said. “So I think, in addition to it being part of the tourist attraction, it also has a symbolism that people all over the world come here to Montgomery and want to tour this site looking for answers to their stories.”
This area is near the City of St. Jude, the Roman Catholic Church which was the last campsite on the Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965.
New plants will go in over the next week so that it’s ready for March 25. That’s the date in 1965 that marchers were at St. Jude as they finished their journey to the Alabama Capitol.
