Montgomery, Alabama, is a top suggestion from Elaine Glusac of The New York Times for 2024. Delve into the city’s rich civil rights history as the former capital of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the civil rights movement. Explore its artistic side at the new sculpture park, where outdoor art installations blend with historic charm, commemorating pivotal moments in America’s quest for equality.

The Equal Justice Initiative will debut Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. On the banks of the Alabama River, the 17-acre park will exhibit works by Kehinde Wiley and Theaster Gates; artifacts, including dwellings relocated from a cotton plantation and a pen where enslaved people were held; and the 43-foot-tall National Monument to Freedom. Dedicated to the millions of enslaved Black people who were emancipated at the end of the Civil War, the steel-walled monument, which resembles an open book, will be engraved with more than 120,000 of their surnames.

Don’t overlook the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, inaugurated in 2018. It’s the inaugural memorial tackling racial terror across the U.S., symbolized by 800 hanging steel columns, each representing a county where a lynching occurred.