The Loving family didn’t push for the historic Caroline County Courthouse Campus in Bowling Green, Virginia, to be added to the U.S. Civil Rights Trail. In fact, members of the Loving family, who remained in Caroline County, wanted to stay under the radar, said Kathy Beard, tourism manager in the county.
The courthouse campus is where Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and a Black woman, were arrested and briefly jailed in 1959 after pleading guilty to violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which banned interracial marriage.
“We have long wanted to honor the Loving family,” said Beard, who orchestrated the site’s inclusion on the growing U.S. Civil Rights Trail, a collection of museums, churches, landmarks, schools, courthouses, and other landmarks where civil rights activists challenged segregation and other unjust laws in the 1950s and 1960s to further social justice and equality.
The trail launched in 2018 with 110 key inaugural sites, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where the infamous march known as Bloody Sunday took place; the F.W. Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where four college students launched a sit-in movement; and The King Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Now the trail comprises 140 sites across 14 states and Washington, D.C.
The mural Awakening: The Life & Legacy of T.C. Walker stands beside the Gloucester Museum of History in Virginia, a newly designated Civil Rights Trail site honoring pioneering Black attorney Thomas Calhoun Walker.
Credit: US Civil Rights Trail
Six new sites across the South
The historic Caroline County Courthouse Campus is one of six new sites added to the trail this year. It’s joined by the Gloucester Museum of History in Gloucester, Virginia; the Texas & Pacific Railway Depot in Natchitoches, Louisiana; the Jefferson Street Sound Museum and the Museum of Christian & Gospel Music in Nashville; and the Jacksonville Civil Rights Trail in Florida.
Liz Bittner, president and CEO of Travel South USA and managing director of the marketing alliance around the trail, reviewed the dozen or so submissions and was part of making the final selection of trail additions.
The criteria are straightforward: Sites must be directly related to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and they must have a tourism component, whether that’s a museum or an interactive map—something for visitors to experience.
In the case of two new additions in Tennessee, the Jefferson Street Sound Museum (opened in 2011) and the Museum of Christian & Gospel Music (opened in 2025), the visitor experience was already in place. And the museums’ connections to civil rights history, including “the actions of many African American artists during that time period,” made their inclusion a clear fit, Bittner explained.
Travel South’s budget for the growing trail is minimal, said Bittner, and none of the sites, a majority of which are free for visitors, receives federal funding or financial assistance from Travel South. The sites may receive a plaque of distinction or other assets, and all will be featured on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail website, complete with videos, podcasts, and other educational information to enhance and deepen visitors’ understanding of this chapter of American history.
“What happened here changed the world,” said Bittner.
The Jefferson Street Sound Museum in Nashville joins the U.S. Civil Rights Trail’s 2026 expansion, recognizing the neighborhood’s deep ties to Black musical and civil rights history.
Credit: Jefferson Street Sound Museum
Turning Civil Rights Movement history into visitor experiences
Even with the Loving site’s clear place in Civil Rights Movement history, getting it onto the trail required creating a clear tourism element. The courthouse is a working one, operating several days a week, and is not open to the public, so visitors to the destination will be able to see inside the courtroom by accessing a QR code. The University of Mary Washington in nearby Fredericksburg, Virginia—where James Farmer Multicultural Center Assistant Director Chris Williams aided in the application process for the courthouse campus to the trail—is also creating a story map that highlights the locations connected to the consequential case.
This year, the second city trail in Florida was added to the larger U.S. trail. Joining the Newtown African American Heritage Trail in Sarasota, Florida, the Jacksonville Civil Rights Trail highlights the community leaders, educators, and organizations that challenged injustice. Pat McCollough, special advisor to the mayor for civic engagement and youth participation, said the effort to document Jacksonville’s civil rights history began eight years ago.
Unlike that of a single museum or church, Jacksonville’s designation unfolds across multiple neighborhoods. There’s a live interactive map of each site in Jacksonville with average walking and driving times, McCollough said. The first commemorative plaque there was unveiled February 26 at Mount Ararat Missionary Baptist Church, honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1961 speech there. A total of 40 plaques will be installed across the city over the next 8 to 12 months.
“You can’t walk it,” McCollough said. Visitors can’t even drive to all the spots in a single day, given the size of the North Florida city.
For Jacksonville and the other destinations and sites on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, the goal is the same: that visitors leave with a deeper understanding of the movement that reshaped the nation.
“If you don’t recognize and remember your history,” Bittner said, “there is always a chance that we repeat ourselves.”
