Fifty-Four Miles on Tired Feet

On March 21, 1965, approximately 3,200 marchers set out from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, walking toward the state capitol in Montgomery. They walked for justice — specifically, the right to vote that had been systematically denied to Black citizens across Dallas County, where only two percent of eligible Black voters were registered. The road stretched fifty-four miles through the Alabama Black Belt, and they would walk it over five days, sleeping in muddy fields, enduring cold rain and the threat of violence that had already bloodied them on that same route just two weeks earlier.

They walked. Not in buses, not in motorcades — on foot. By the time they reached the steps of the Alabama State Capitol on March 25, their ranks had swelled to twenty-five thousand. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the crowd, but it was the walking itself that testified. Feet blistered and swollen, legs aching, yet no one fainted. Five months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

Isaiah 40:31 promises that those who wait upon the Lord "shall walk and not faint." That Hebrew word for "wait" — qavah — means to bind together, like strands twisted into rope. The marchers from Selma understood this. Their strength was not individual endurance but collective hope bound to a righteous God. When justice demands a long road, the Almighty does not send a shortcut. He renews the strength of those willing to walk it together.