The Road That Required Three Tries

On March 7, 1965, six hundred marchers set out from Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, demanding voting rights. They made it only to the far side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge before state troopers beat them back with billy clubs and tear gas — a day the nation would call Bloody Sunday. Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr. led a second attempt but turned the marchers around at the bridge, honoring a federal court process while awaiting legal protection.

Most movements would have died there. Two attempts. Two failures. But these marchers understood something about perseverance that the watching world did not.

On March 21, after federal Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. ruled in their favor, 3,200 marchers stepped onto that same bridge for the third time, now protected by federalized National Guard troops. They walked fifty-four miles over four days through rain and blistering feet. When they reached the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery on March 25, their ranks had swelled to twenty-five thousand.

The writer of Hebrews understood this kind of endurance: "You have need of perseverance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive what is promised" (Hebrews 10:36). Victory did not come on the first crossing or the second. It came to those who refused to let setback become surrender.