Fifty years ago, when future congressman John Lewis attempted to lead 600 peaceful protesters out of Selma, Ala., across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met with tear gas, nightsticks and horses’ hooves.
The widely publicized brutality of Bloody Sunday helped ensure that the successful march from Selma to Montgomery, two weeks later, was not just a rally; it was also a symbol.
Civil rights leaders such as Lewis, hoping to build support for the Voting Rights Act, wanted to show the determination of blacks to fight the Jim Crow system that disenfranchised them. Five decades later, the march remains synonymous with the struggle for change.
Change did follow — the Voting Rights Act, signed into law in August 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, prohibited racial discrimination at the polls — but the vision behind it has been only partially realized.
Especially along this 54-mile route, the goal of economic equality, the target of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final efforts, is far from fulfilled. Signs of segregation persist.
The marchers of 1965 stayed at four ad hoc campsites along the route, on land owned by supporters of the movement. On the third night, the tents were pitched at Robert Gardner Farm, where some of the host’s relatives still live. Some marchers sheltered from heavy rains on the porch of the big house, but nobody lives there today. It has fallen into disrepair, and Gardner’s widow, Mary, 89, has moved into a mobile home next door.
Robert Gardner’s sister was married to A.G. Gaston, a wealthy black entrepreneur from Birmingham, Ala. Mary Gardner remembers him telling march organizers, “Look for Robert Gardner’s farm, and they will let them camp.”
“I was a little scared,” she remembers.
But the protesters were protected by the Alabama National Guard, federalized by Johnson, along with FBI agents, federal marshals and 2,000 soldiers. And the Gardner property was monitored long after the marchers left, for fear of retribution.
Elsewhere in Lowndes County, white landowners evicted blacks who registered to vote, forcing them to create a tent city where an interpretive center now stands.
“We were taking a risk,” Gardner recalls.
The old injustices continue to rankle the former elementary school teacher. “I had a B.S. in elementary education from Alabama State University,” says Gardner, who went on to get a master’s degree. “And I couldn’t vote because I was black.”
Gardner’s warm, one-story home is decorated with photographs of Gaston and other family members commemorating the achievements of the past. It all seemed so full of promise.
It’s the future she worries about. “Young folks need to get themselves in school, get a job.”
Fifty-four miles from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marble steps of the state Capitol rise up from Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue. It’s here that 25,000 protesters gathered March 25, 1965.
Celebrities — including Joan Baez and Harry Belafonte — arrived at the final campsite for a rally, joining marchers who had “walked every step of the way,” says Lewis, whose dress-shoe soles were worn through.
King addressed the crowd: “I stand before you this afternoon with the conviction that segregation is on its deathbed in Alabama.”
Memorial marches still finish at these steps, as the next one will on March 13. Rooms in the handful of hotels in Montgomery’s renovated downtown blocks have been booked for months.
On a recent Saturday, a few hundred members of the Sanctity of Marriage movement assemble here. Aaron Motley, a black pastor, condemns the notion that the gay rights movement is comparable to the civil rights struggle: “One seeks to protect our rights as human beings under the U.S. Constitution and moral laws, and the other seeks the acceptance of a perverted lifestyle.”
From the podium, a voice intones that, if Americans legalize same-sex marriage, “we should legalize murder, rape, child pornography and theft.”
It’s a striking inversion of the speeches from half a century ago, when a minority requested the rights granted to the rest of America.
