The NewSouth Bookstore welcomes tour groups large and small. No advance notice is required if your group would like to visit. Do contact our bookstore manager, however, if you’d like your group to be received with light refreshments.
Tour groups coming to Montgomery to discover its special history will enjoy discovering little bits of such history at the store itself. Located between the Freedom Rides Museum and the Rosa Parks Museum, at the corner of South Court Street and Washington Avenue, the store boasts thousands of titles with a special focus on Southern history and culture, including the subjects of the antebellum South, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and civil rights. The site of the former Montgomery Shoe Factory, our building has signage down along the stairwell detailing the formerly segregated bathrooms that were once required by Jim Crow custom and law. The shoe-shaped sign adorning the exterior of the building not only announces its old business but is also the last opal glass sign with such a unique shape known to still exist in the United States. Additionally, we have prominently placed in our store a couch that belonged to civil rights leader Johnnie Carr. Once a silent witness to history-making figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, E.D. Nixon, and Rosa Parks, who often visited with Ms. Carr, the couch survives in this quiet establishment almost seventy years later. That doesn’t mean you can’t sit on it. As our store owner likes to say, “Put your fanny where Rosa Parks had hers.”
