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.…