Selma to Montgomery
The Road to Equality

(Excerpted from the February 2000 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)

By Chuck Stone

Driving on an Alabama four-lane highway through an idyllic countryside on a sun-blistered July day with the convertible top down is not a setting for serious reflection. But I could not stop thinking about this famous highway, paved with the memories and the blood of freedom marchers.

Thirty-five years ago civil rights activists followed this route, Highway 80, much of it then two lanes lined by cotton fields, from Selma to Montgomery in a protest that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Back then Selma was a small southern town of 28,000 people with segregated schools, housing, jobs, theaters, swimming pools. Like millions of African Americans across the South, those in Selma were denied the right to vote by poll taxes, literacy tests, and other intimidation tactics. In Selma’s county, Dallas, more than half the voting-age population was black, but only 2 percent was registered to vote.

During Freedom Summer of 1964, blacks as well as whites staged an intensive effort across the South to end segregation and secure voting rights. They met massive resistance from white segregationists. Volunteers were killed; black churches burned. In Selma, as in most places, voter registration was a grassroots effort, led by the Dallas County Voters League with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”), an organization born in 1960 out of the South’s lunch-counter sit-ins.

But at the Dallas County Courthouse, where registration was open only two days a month, black citizens were still being turned back by Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies. The Voters League appealed to Martin Luther King, Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to add his charismatic clout.

In January 1965 King launched “a determined, organized, mobilized” series of demonstrations in Alabama. “We must be willing to go to jail by the thousands,” he thundered from the pulpit of Selma’s Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. “We are not on our knees begging for the ballot, we are demanding the ballot.”

By early February more than 3,000 black protesters in the Selma area had spent time in jail, including hundreds of schoolchildren.

Annie Lee Cooper, a 53-year-old Selman who helped manage a motel, defiantly stood up to Sheriff Clark on the steps of the Dallas County Courthouse. “Ain’t nobody scared around here,” she told Clark, who then pushed her hard enough to make her stagger. Cooper retaliated with a knockdown punch to Clark’s head. Deputies pinned her to the ground, and Clark hit her repeatedly with his billy club. “Clark whacked her so hard,” said SNCC leader John Lewis, now a U.S. congressman from Georgia, “we could hear the sound several rows back.”

Bloodied and bruised, she was taken to jail.

“We avoided holding demonstrations at night,” Lewis told me. “It was too dangerous.” Those fears were realized in the nearby town of Marion on the evening of February 18, when an orgy of beatings hospitalized several marchers and fatally wounded a 26-year-old man named Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was trying to protect his mother.

Jackson’s death galvanized Selma’s voting rights movement. Though not initially a part of SCLC’s campaign strategy, a massive march from Selma to Montgomery was planned. At the time, no one anticipated the inspirational place it would take in U.S. history.

On Sunday, March 7, hundreds of demonstrators, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams of SCLC, set out on the 54-mile [86-kilometer] trek. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge they confronted Alabama state troopers sent by Governor George Wallace, along with Jim Clark and his “posse.” Ordered to disperse, the marchers stood fast. Troopers began to push them back; marchers began to fall. Clark’s men, some on horseback, charged in. A chaos of teargassing, whipping, and clubbing left several demonstrators unconscious and the rest running for their lives. Ironically, a nonviolent march violently ended in Bloody Sunday.

Televised images of flailing billy clubs spilled into living rooms across the country. Americans were horrified. Even George Wallace reprimanded the state troopers for their actions. Hundreds of people from other states, including 450 white clergymen, nuns, and rabbis, headed toward Selma to support the voting rights campaign.

Momentum began building for another march. A federal judge issued an injunction prohibiting it until the demonstrators’ safety could be ensured. Still, on Tuesday, March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led 2,000 people across Pettus Bridge. Once again state troopers blocked the way. King turned the marchers around, and no one was injured.

The following week President Lyndon Johnson went on television to call for legislation banning restrictions that denied blacks the right to vote. “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice,” he said, dramatically concluding with the civil rights refrain: “And we shall overcome.”

The stage was set for the third and final push. For five days, from March 21 to 25, the road between Selma and Montgomery was lined with marchers, their numbers ebbing and flowing. Led by King, more than 3,000 people set out from Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. Among those at the head with King were fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche and theologian Rabbi Abraham Heschel. At the march’s end the crowd that King addressed live on national television from the foot of the State Capitol steps had swelled beyond 25,000. Another speaker was Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus had helped set off the modern civil rights movement in 1955.

“The march was a turning point in the movement,” said John Lewis. That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed that every American 21 or older could exercise the right to register and vote. In Alabama alone the number of registered black voters jumped from 92,700 in 1965 to 250,000 in 1967.

Sheyann Webb Christburg, who at age seven made all three marches from Selma, without her parents, remembers the emotion. “I asked my parents to become registered voters for my birthday present. I thought that my parents could be free citizens if they voted—that’s what I wanted for them.” The first time they voted, they took Sheyann along to the polls. Today an administrator at Alabama State University in Montgomery, she said, “I’ve never forgotten it.”

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