Because They Marched: Chapter 7–Epilogue

By now, the original group of five hundred had expanded to an exuberant, noisy throng of 3,200 blacks and whites from all over the country, including many who had never marched before and others who had been demonstrating against racial injustice for years.

The marchers were all but surrounded by scores of reporters and cameramen, who would follow every step of the way on their five-day trek along Highway 80.

The troops had been dispatched by President Johnson after Governor Wallace had denounced the marchers as “Communist-trained agitators” and insisted that Alabama could not afford to pay state troopers to protect them.

The marchers sang as they moved along, ignoring hecklers along the route who shouted racist slurs and held up signs with handwritten messages such as “Yankee trash go home.”

The marchers sang as they moved along, ignoring hecklers along the route who shouted racist slurs and held up signs with handwritten messages such as “Yankee trash go home.”

Leading the procession along with Dr. King and other civil rights leaders were an Episcopal bishop, a Jewish rabbi, a United Nations diplomat, and four Catholic nuns wearing long black habits.

Each day a team of volunteers in Selma shuttled food and supplies to the campsites.

The road to Montgomery led the marchers through cotton fields and scraggly pine thickets, across twisting rivers and creeks and into dark, gloomy swamps where dead trees draped with gray Spanish moss hugged the roadside.

“The incredible sense of community—of communing—was overwhelming. We felt bonded with one another, with the people we passed, with the entire nation.”

“They sense the elation, the unexpected release. Few of us have shared any life as close as those ‘on location’ in the Civil Rights Movement. Shared beds and sofas, hands caressing the shoulders of little children, smiles and a spreading comradeship, absorption: this is...a great experience.”

On Tuesday the marchers, drenched by torrential downpours, trudged along in their plastic ponchos, singing in the rain.

On Tuesday the marchers, drenched by torrential downpours, trudged along in their plastic ponchos, singing in the rain.

As the day passed, cars and buses kept stopping alongside the moving procession, discharging new marchers who had flocked to Montgomery to walk the last few miles to the capitol.

“Make way for the originals!” the marshals shouted, forming a cordon to hold back the other marchers and the press.

“The marchers pushed down the street joyfully, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ at the top of their lungs,” Roy Reed of the New York Times reported. “Rain and all, the entry into Montgomery had a grandeur that was almost biblical.”

“When the marchers arrived from Selma, we were there to greet them,” said Gladis Williams, a Montgomery high school student and member of the welcoming committee. “Thousands were there. Joy! That’s what you felt....They had come fifty miles but when you’re marching and singing, it doesn’t faze you how far it is.”

Speaking from the steps of the capitol, prominent civil rights leaders and ordinary citizens recalled the turbulent events at Selma that had turned the voting rights campaign into a mass protest against racial injustice.

The murderers were arrested within hours because one of the Klansmen was actually an undercover FBI informant who, as he later testified, had tried to persuade the others to give up the chase.

The murderers were arrested within hours because one of the Klansmen was actually an undercover FBI informant who, as he later testified, had tried to persuade the others to give up the chase.

As the swelling throng marched singing into Montgomery, the Voting Rights Act was beginning its own contested journey through the political thickets of Congress.

President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6 in the ornate President’s Room of the Capitol as Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders looked on.

The act, in effect, abolished poll taxes, literacy tests and other barriers to equal opportunity at the ballot box.

It has never been determined whether his assassin, a white petty criminal named James Earl Ray, acted alone, as he claimed, or as part of a conspiracy.

It has never been determined whether his assassin, a white petty criminal named James Earl Ray, acted alone, as he claimed, or as part of a conspiracy.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency in 2007, he spoke at a ceremony in Selma commemorating the forty-second anniversary of the march to Montgomery.

In 2013 the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority, arguing that the law’s original requirements were no longer justified.

He added that Congress remained free to impose federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, but must do so on the basis of current conditions.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg drew sharply different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement.

She cited the words of Martin Luther King, declaring that his legacy and the nation’s commitment to justice had been “disserved by today’s decision.”