This post was updated on August 25, 2024.

I’m debuting a course on Religion, Race, and Ethnicity at Samford University in fall 2021. Registration opens to seniors on Wednesday so on my usual Saturday bike ride I stopped at a number of sites in greater Birmingham, Alabama to film short (less than 60 second) Instagram videos related to the subject. I also posted a few still shots.

The collection of sites I visited is a bit mixed and shaped in part by geography and where I wanted to go for my own sake on my 66-mile bike ride this lovely spring day. But it talks about historic African American churches, the integration of one of Birmingham’s main cemeteries, Buddhists from Sri Lanka, Christians from Lebanon, how railroads defined the different “sides of the tracks,” and lots of other things. I added four more sites to the collection on a ride two-weeks later. You can view the videos through the consolidated YouTube videos embeded below, or access them on Instagram using the Google map further down this page.

A consolidated video of most of the sites I visited on March 13, 2021 is below.

Four additional sites visited March 27, 2021.