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Photo: Chris Pruitt, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This is a place where kids can explore science. Some of the highlights are the World of Water with fish and other aquatic life and the Alabama Collections Center with fossils and pre-Columbian artifacts.
The McWane Science Center is a science museum and research archive located in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, United States. The state-of-the-art hands-on science center, aquarium, and 250-seat IMAX Dome Theater is housed in the historic and refurbished Loveman's department store building. It opened to the public on July 11, 1998.
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Numerous performances including concerts, comedians and movies take place at this 2,200-seat, exquisitely preserved old vaudeville and movie palace built by Paramount in 1927.
Founded in 1978, the museum part opened in 1993 with exhibits from instruments to dresses on display. Of course you also get to experience the music itself in jazz performances, workshops and courses.
This four-acre park was named for a local World War I hero, but is best known as the place where the climactic confrontation between the attack dog- and firehose-wielding Birmingham police and fire departments, led by Public Works Commissioner "Bull" Connor, and the student demonstrators from the SCLC, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, took place. The park was rededicated in 1992 as a "place of revolution and reconciliation" in commemoration of these pivotal events, and now contains a number of sculptural exhibits. Notable among those is Four Spirits, unveiled in 2013 as a memorial to the young victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing (read on).
On September 15, 1963, in the aftermath of the Birmingham campaign (and at the beginning of the first school year in which the city's public schools were integrated), four members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed this oldest African-American church in Birmingham with dynamite, killing four young girls at choir practice and further outraging the nation and solidifying support in Congress for civil rights legislation. The church was rebuilt and remains in operation today, welcoming visitors both to Sunday services (10:45AM) and to the basement exhibition space featuring historical photographs and displays related to the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham.
Interpretive museum and research center, where you can learn about the struggle for civil rights through such engaging exhibits as a mocked-up 1950s-era segregated city, a replica of a Freedom Riders bus from Mississippi, and even the actual door from the cell in Birmingham Jail where Dr. Martin Luther King was held (see below). Researchers have at their disposal an expansive archive of documents and recordings.
Visual art from all over the world, from ancient Egyptian to contemporary American. In particular, its Asian section is considered the best in the southeastern U.S.