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Selma to Montgomery: The 1965 Voting Rights March

In early 1965 Black residents of Selma, Alabama, backed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC, pressed for the right to vote. After a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in nearby Marion, activists called for a march to the state capital. Troopers stopped the first attempt on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 7 March; the third march, under federal protection, reached Montgomery on 25 March. The route follows the marchers from Marion to Selma's Brown Chapel and the bridge, across Lowndes County's muddy campsites and the City of St. Jude to the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. The Voting Rights Act followed that summer. The farm campsites are not pinned exactly.

6 locations6/6 visitable

HistoryApproximate

Freedom Riders: Washington to Jackson, 1961

The Supreme Court had ruled that segregated waiting rooms and lunch counters in terminals serving interstate buses were illegal, but across the Deep South the "whites only" signs stayed up. On 4 May 1961 thirteen volunteers of the Congress of Racial Equality, black and white together, set out from Washington, D.C., on two buses to test the ruling all the way to New Orleans. In Alabama they were met by mobs, a burning bus and police who looked away; hundreds more riders followed them into the jails of Mississippi. The route follows the rides through the places where it happened, several of them now museums and part of a National Monument.

8 locations7/8 visitable