You need to get to the rain forests before they're all gone, and the polar ice caps may have melted by the time you try to see them, but it's Alabama that demands your immediate attention. And by Alabama I mean that place where elegant black ladies of a certain age stand sentinel over the trails through civil rights country.

Really. They're lit from within, these women; they glow as only people can who never thought they'd live to see the day but then live to see the day. As they gaze out on the landscape of a country facing agonizing choices and certain pain, they haven't a doubt in the world that we'll get through this. After all, we've gotten through far worse.

As I explored Birmingham's Civil Rights District, pedestrians raced through Kelly Ingram Park, a standard-issue urban green space where pansies now grow in dainty rows but where thousands once gathered to demand an end to segregation and police retaliated by siccing attack dogs on children and aiming at them with fire hoses powerful enough to strip bark off trees.

Across the street at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a museum and research center, five massive picture windows overlook the park in a room devoted to the Kelly Ingram chapter of the story. Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era Exhibition, an exhibit that tells the story of the Vietnam War's impact on African American life and culture, opened in October.

The institute also houses a charred Greyhound bus, a replica of one that a group of Freedom Riders rode through Alabama before it was firebombed, and the pale green bars of the cell where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous ``Letter From Birmingham Jail.''

And when you get to the end of a long series of hallways (a gut-wrenching trip that begins with sharecropper mannequins and ends with a quote from then-Sen. Barack Obama: ``We are the ones we've been waiting for''), you get to Yvonne Williams' desk. Before coming to the institute, Williams spent 31 years teaching fourth grade in Birmingham public schools. And still she retired too soon.

``We used to have that poster with all the presidents, you know?'' Williams says. ``And I distinctly remember this little boy coming up to me one day and saying, `Mrs. Williams, where is the black one?' I thought, Lord, give me the words to say it.'' She stops for a moment, collects herself.

``I just said to him, `Maybe in your lifetime.' ''

Williams has worked in the institute's research division for five years now ``and will be here til God sends me home.'' She worries about the younger generation, for whom nonviolent resistance is a quaint notion, and she wonders if they've already forgotten the rocky road to the Obama presidency. They're up against a lot these days, she says, and toughness in the face of such trials is the only thing that's going to work.

``We just have to keep fighting. That's what I tell them. That's what America's all about. Don't stop.''

FREEDOM TRAILS

There isn't just one civil rights trail in Alabama, just as there wasn't a single strand to the movement. The state capital, Montgomery, 90 miles south of Birmingham, will forever be associated with Rosa Parks and the 1955 bus boycott. Selma saw the struggle for voting rights that led to the bloody 1965 confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and, ultimately, the 54-mile, four-day march to Montgomery that brought Alabama to the nation's -- and the world's -- attention. The route, along U.S. Highway 80, has been designated a historic trail, and the National Park Service operates a terrific visitors center at the route's midpoint.

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