2023 Road Trip: Civil Rights Trail: Montgomery to Selma (5/6/2023)

Saturday, May 6, 2023 (continued)
Next we followed the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, although backwards. The three Marches to Montgomery in 1965 were organized to protest the blocking of Black Americans' right to vote by the systematic racist laws of the Jim Crow South.

Along the 54-mile trek, locations of the four campgrounds
where marchers spent the night were marked; the
non-violent campaign was well-organized with logistics
such as food, water, sanitation, tents, and first aid provided

Lowndes Interpretive Center (2006), is located on the site
of a "Tent City," a settlement that was established to house
Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers sho were forced
off their land for attempting to register to vote

Marching Toward Freedom shows
Timothy Mays who carried the American flag
most of the way during the 1965 march 

Re-creation inside a tent of Tent City

A mural at the Bloody Sunday site at the south end
of the Edmund Pettus Bridge

Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade discrimination in voting on the basis of race, efforts to register Black voters met resistance in some southern states, notoriously in Alabama. In February 1965, white segregationists attacked a group of Black protestors for voting rights in Marion, AL, which resulted in the death of a young Black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to organize a protest march from Selma to Montgomery. On March 7, 1965, 600 marchers followed activists John Lewis and Hosea Williams out of Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were met by Alabama state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks, and tear gas, who beat them back across the bridge. The scene was captured on television and brought many civil rights and religious leaders of all faiths to Selma.

On March 9, Dr Martin Luther King Jr was present to lead the second attempt to march to Montgomery, this time with more than 2,000 marchers. Again Alabama state troopers met them, and Dr King paused the marchers to stop and pray. He believed the troopers wanted an excuse to enforce the injunction prohibiting the march. Dr King had the marchers return to Selma. Yet the segregationists attacked and killed James Reeb, a young white Unitarian minister who supported the marchers.

On March 15, President Lyndon B Johnson went on national television to pledge his support, proclaiming “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem,” Johnson said, “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice."

Memorial for Dr Martin Luther King, Jr
and Coretta Scott King who participated
in the final March to Montgomery

Inscribed on this rock: When Your Children Shall Ask You
in Time to Come Saying, What Mean These 2 Stones?
Then You Should Tell Them How You Made it Over
(a version of Joshua 4:21-22)

On March 21, this time under the protection of US Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces ordered by President Johnson, the March to Montgomery left Selma. It reached the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery on March 25, where they were met by 50,000 supporters of all races. A white woman from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo, participated in the third March, and afterwards shuttled marchers back to Selma in her car. On her way back to Montgomery with 19-year old Black American volunteer in the car, she was harassed and chased, and finally gunned down by Ku Klux Klan members.

By August 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed, guaranteeing the right to vote (actually already awarded by the 15th Amendment) to all African-Americans. It also banned literacy tests and allowed the US Attorney General to challenge poll taxes.

The Bloody Sunday Memorial might have been
a tourist trap at one time?

The south end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge (1939-1940),
a steel through-arch bridge named for a former Confederate
brigadier general, U.S. senator, and state-level leader
of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan; "we are waiting" for
approval from the Alabama Legislature to rename the
bridge after Congressman John Lewis, although he
personally opposed changing the name

A photo of the third March to Montgomery

At the Selma Interpretive Center of the
Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail,
a poll worker needs us to state how many
jelly beans are in the jar before he can allow
us to vote (does he know the answer?) (KSS)

Symbol of Bigotry, a button worn by Dallas County Sheriff
James Clark and his fellow segregationalists in Selma

Symbol of Change, a button worn by members of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
who came to work with Black churches, civic leaders,
and the Dallas County Voters League

Selma Interpretive Center (2011) is located
in a former bank (1880s)

View of Edmund Pettus Bridge from the Interpretive Center

Brown Chapel AME Church (1908, by
A J Farley in Romanesque Revival style),
which hosted the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference at the beginning of 1965, and was the
start of the March that ended as Bloody Sunday
as well as the successful third March

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial (1979),
which also remembers Jimmie Lee Jackson,
James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo

Tabernacle Baptist Church (1922, by David T West
in Classical Revival style) is where the first mass meeting
of the Voting Rights Movement took place in 1963, under
the direction of Pastor Louis Lloyd Anderson, Civil Rights
activist Amelia Boynton, and SNCC organizer Bernard
Lafayette, Jr; Dr Martin Luther King Jr visited in 1964

Next: Birmingham, AL.