The National Park Service Lowndes Interpretive Center on the
Selma to Montgomery National Historical Trail (US 80), offers, in a small bookstore, a number
of works including “A March for All: Selma’s Voting Rights Movement”, by
Theresa L. Hall, published by Eastern National and the Tuskegee Institute of
Alabama. Curiously, there is no ISBN. The booklet comprises 32 pages, paper.
The booklet gives the history of the March 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in
detail. There were several attempts to
hold demonstrations and marches which were met with police brutality and
vigilantism. There is more detail in the
booklet than in the film at the center (Movies blog today), on the Selma to
Montgomery National Historic Trail.
At the time of the marches, I was living “at home” and one
year from finishing my undergraduate degree at George Washington University in
Washington DC. I had become active in
the university chess club and that had become important in my life. I had heard about the murder of the three
civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, but I really didn’t grasp the
gravity of what was going on. No one in my culture did.
The second picture, above is a higher definition image of the Pettus Bridge from my Nikkon camera (May 23); the similar first image is from a cheaper Cannon camera/
Back in 1964, a bad time for me, I had miss-dialed a long distance number and gotten an operator from "Selma, Alabama". How prescient!
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