Birmingham and Anniston Locations are Now National Park Sites.

     ABC reports President Obama took action in the last days of his administration to name the Anniston Alabama Bus Station and a large area of Downtown Birmingham Alabama as National Civil Rights Monuments.

The Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument will include the now-abandoned A.G. Gaston Motel, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. planned weeks of demonstrations against segregation in the spring of 1963; the park where black protesters were met by police dogs and fire hoses; the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four black girls died in a Ku Klux Klan bombing that year; and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

It also includes a business district that was a hub of black commerce for generations.

Obama also designated two other new national monuments linked to equal rights.

The new Freedom Riders National Monument in the east Alabama city of Anniston will include the Greyhound bus station where a racially integrated bus of activists was attacked in 1961.