Jarring public art brings a city’s past to the fore : Birmingham has chosen to put its role in the civil rights era on display in ways that disturb some.

Morgan Blaylock was a high school student in the 1960s when images of his hometown seared the consciousness of a nation--police dogs attacking civil rights workers, the bombing of black churches, high-powered water cannons knocking schoolchildren off their feet.

“I remember it all very well,” he said the other day while his grandchildren played nearby, a stone’s throw from a church that was bombed by white racists in 1963, killing four young girls.

Now across from the church sits a museum that preserves the history of the civil rights movement. An adjacent park has been turned into an outdoor memorial, a place of reflection to commemorate the sacrifices of the “foot soldiers” of that contentious era.

Blaylock, a 49-year-old African American, comes here regularly with his grandchildren so they can play. But “I don’t really want them to know about that,” he said as he gestured toward a statue of a white policeman and dog attacking a black boy. “We don’t have to teach fear or hatred or racism when it’s still here.” Monuments, he said, should be uplifting.

Blaylock’s views are not uncommon in the South, a region with a long, painful history that, to many, feels all too recent.

But the pain inherent in Southern history isn’t keeping Alabama from using the civil rights movement and Civil War to market itself as a tourism mecca.

Alabama is using a $1.5-million federal grant to turn the 50-mile stretch of U.S. 80 between Selma and Montgomery into a memorial with historical markers and information centers. Civil rights marchers who made the trek in 1965 were beaten by police on horseback in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

In addition, brochures and maps identifying civil rights and Civil War sites are being used to market the state.

“As a state we tend to think that the outside world might think ill of us if we discuss all of the details of our history,” said Aubrey Miller, director of the Alabama Department of Tourism. “It’s sort of like family skeletons in the closet. You don’t want to show them to anybody. As a result, you have a generation or two growing up in the house who don’t know anything about the skeletons that are there.

“In the past we pretended that these events didn’t take place,” he said. “Now we basically stand up and say, ‘This really did take place, and if you want to experience this in the context of the state, here is our suggested itinerary.’ ”

For more than a century, the monuments and symbols of the South have tended to exclude African American history. Confederate memorials dot the main squares of town after town.

Atlanta has Stone Mountain, a Southern Mt. Rushmore and former Ku Klux Klan gathering spot featuring the likenesses of rebel generals. Richmond, Va., has its Monument Avenue, a grand boulevard on which the brooding images of Robert E. Lee and others watch over the city.

But in recent years, as the political power of African Americans has grown, the South’s pantheon of recognized heroes has expanded. Civil rights museums have sprouted in several cities, most notably Birmingham and Memphis, Tenn., where the motel where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain has been transformed.

Downtown Montgomery features a monument designed by the architect who fashioned Washington’s Vietnam War Memorial. And the most popular tourist attraction in Atlanta is not Stone Mountain but King’s crypt and birth home.

But for many Southerners, black and white, the civil rights movement remains too painful an era to commemorate.

Kelly Ingram Park, where the statue of the attacking police dog stands, is a case in point. It has been turned into a sculpture garden with a reflecting pool and a number of jarring sculptures that seek to evoke the horror of 1960s street confrontations.

One black steel sculpture portrays black youths cowering against a wall with machine gun-like water cannons aimed at their backs. Another features snarling dogs that protrude over the sidewalk, violating the space of visitors who walk past.

Art Grayson, president of the city’s Parks and Recreation Board, which oversees the installation of public art, said he finds most of the sculptures “tolerable.” But he feels they belong in a museum--not in a public space, thrusting unpleasant memories into the faces of city residents every day.

Despite the mixed feelings in Birmingham over the way the city has memorialized the civil rights era, Miller said the state has encountered no resistance over its plans to market Alabama’s civil rights history. He acknowledged, however, that he encounters more interest and knowledge of the state’s history from outsiders than from Alabamians, who seem to simply want to forget.