Selma to Montgomery: The 1965 Voting Rights March

On the night of 18 February 1965 about 500 people left Zion United Methodist Church in Marion to walk to the Perry County jail, where the civil-rights worker James Orange was held. They planned to sing hymns and return. Instead the streetlights went out and police began beating the marchers. Jimmie Lee Jackson, his mother and his grandfather ran into Mack's Café behind the church, and a trooper shot Jackson twice in the abdomen. He died eight days later. James Bevel then called for a march from Selma to Montgomery to talk to Governor Wallace about Jackson's death. In 2010 the former trooper James Bonard Fowler pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Location precision: The pin marks the church the march left; the café where Jackson was shot lay behind it.

Visitor guidance: The Marion to Selma Connecting Trail, designated in 2015, links the site of Jackson's death with the national trail.

Brown Chapel, a red-brick church built in 1908, was the movement's base in Selma. Martin Luther King addressed a mass meeting here on 2 January 1965, in defiance of an injunction against such gatherings, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was hosted here for the first three months of the year. The Selma to Montgomery marches set out from the church, and on 21 March close to 8,000 people gathered here for the walk to Montgomery. A memorial service for James Reeb was also held in the church on 15 March. The building is a National Historic Landmark.

Visitor guidance: Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church stands at 410 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Selma.

On Sunday 7 March 1965 an estimated 525 to 600 marchers, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, headed out of Selma on U.S. 80. The bridge hid what lay beyond: the marchers could not see the police on the east side until they reached the top. Troopers shoved them, beat them with nightsticks, fired tear gas and charged on horseback. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized and fifty more treated; John Lewis suffered a skull fracture. On 9 March Martin Luther King led about 2,500 to the bridge, prayed and turned them around. The bridge is named for Edmund Pettus, a Confederate general and Alabama Klan leader.

Visitor guidance: It is an active four-lane road bridge, so take care on foot.

With a court order allowing the march, the walkers set out on 21 March and camped on farmland for three nights. First came farmer David Hall's land; then the property of Rosie Steele, a 78-year-old Black landowner, where red ants infested the ground near her store; then Robert Gardner's farm, where students from Tuskegee Institute supplied dinner. Under the court's terms only 300 could march on the two-lane stretch of U.S. 80. The county was 81 percent Black, yet not one Black resident was registered to vote. Some marchers wore kippot, which they called "freedom caps".

Location precision: The sources do not give the farm campsites' exact positions; the pin marks the National Park Service's Lowndes Interpretive Center in White Hall, along the route.

Visitor guidance: The National Park Service's Lowndes Interpretive Center in White Hall is open during regular operating hours.

On the last night, 24 March, the marchers camped at the City of St. Jude, a complex on the outskirts of Montgomery founded in 1934 by Fr Harold Purcell. About 10,000 people slept on an athletic field. The pastor had asked Bishop Toolen for permission to let them stay, and it was granted. That evening the Stars for Freedom rally was held on a makeshift stage of empty coffin shipping crates topped with plywood; Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez and Nina Simone were among the performers.

Visitor guidance: The chapel stands today just as it did in 1965, and the campus opened its own interpretive center in 2015.

On Thursday 25 March 1965 some 25,000 people marched from St. Jude to the steps of the State Capitol, where Martin Luther King gave the speech known as "How Long, Not Long": "however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long." A line of state troopers blocked the door, and the marchers were told the governor was not in. That night Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit, was killed by Ku Klux Klan members while ferrying marchers back to Selma. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on 6 August.

Visitor guidance: The Capitol functions as a museum, and its steps remain as they were in 1965.