On assignment in Montgomery, Ala., recently, I toured the Rosa Parks Museum with a capacity student crowd; sang “We Shall Overcome” in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church with tour-goers from Ohio, California and China; and waited 10 minutes in line at the Southern Poverty Law Center museum to buy my souvenir water bottle (for a good cause).

My experience, it turns out, is indicative of the current excitement surrounding civil rights tourism in the United States 50 years after the assassination of the movement’s leader, Dr. King.

“It’s a part of American history, not just African-American history,” said Andrea Taylor, the chief executive of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Ala. “There seems to be a convergence of interest in telling a more complete version of American evolution to include communities of color and particularly African-American communities.”

The institute is part of the U.S. Civil Rights Trail, which launched in January, and identifies 110 locations associated with Civil Rights history in the 1950s and 60s across 14 states. They range from the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where peaceful protesters staged sit-ins, to the house of Daisy Bates, an organizer of the desegregation effort at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas.