Historic Civil Rights Trail Adds Interpretive Center

 

This FBI photo shows police attacking the Selma, Ala. marchers on March 7, 1965.

The Selma-to-Montgomery, Ala. march for voting rights in 1965 encompassed three weeks of civil rights activities: On Sunday March 7, 1965, about 600 civil rights marchers began walking out of Selma headed east on U.S. Route 80 toward Montgomery, the state capitol, but got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The local law enforcement beat and tear-gassed them, turning the marchers back. Two days later, Martin Luther King, Jr., headed a symbolic march to the bridge. Then, after civil rights leaders received court protection for a march from Selma to Montgomery, about 3,000 marchers set out on the 54-mile route Sunday March 21, 1965. By the time the marchers reached Montgomery, they were 25,000 strong. Less than five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1996 the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail was created by Congress under the National Trails System Act of 1968.

Catherine Light, who received a Landscape Architect degree from the University of Georgia in 1993, works for the National Park Service as the superintendent of the Selma-to-Montgomery Historic Trail. She is standing in front of the trail's interpretive center in White Hall, Ala., now under construction. Photo by Alvin Benn, Montgomery Advertiser.