Showcase: March from Selma
March 13, 2000: Thirty-five years ago this week, after months of unsuccessful efforts to register black voters in Alabama, a group of protesters set out on what would be the first of three attempts to march from Selma to Montgomery. As the protesters crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, just outside of Selma, they were turned back by state troopers, who beat them with clubs and doused them with tear gas.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was not there on "Bloody Sunday," but a couple of days later he led two thousand protesters back along the same route. Most of the marchers assumed that they were going to proceed on to Montgomery, but King, in a move that would anger many, had agreed to obey a court order, and he turned the marchers back at the bridge. Finally, on March 21, 1965, he led the demonstrators -- now thirty-two thousand strong -- over the bridge once again. The march to Montgomery took five days.
Dan Budnik's photographs of these events, taken for Life, were never published; they are now on display in Selma's tiny National Voting Rights Museum. Once in Montgomery, King and his wife, Coretta, went to the airport to meet Harry Belefonte, and they are pictured here waiting. On March 25th, a crowd of twenty-five thousand gathered in front of the Alabama state capitol.
"I know you are asking today, 'How long will it take?'" King said. "I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you will reap what you sow. How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
-- Elizabeth Kolbert
The entire exhibit can be viewed online at: http://www.greenmarketplace.com
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