This exhibition of 67 original vintage news photos memorializes the Selma to Montgomery March, a pivotal event of the Civil Rights movement that led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With voting rights once again under attack, this moving and memorable exhibition is as timely as ever. These are the very press prints, culled from newspaper archives, that appeared on front pages and did so much to move the needle of public opinion. 

The years 1955 through 1965 were a heroic decade in the Civil Rights struggle, and no state played a more momentous role than Alabama. Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in December 1955 sparked the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The boycott culminated in the Supreme Court ruling that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. In 1963 the federally-enforced integration of the University of Alabama made national headlines and served as the springboard for segregationist Governor George Wallace’s two third-party runs for the presidency. The nonviolent protests and business boycotts in Birmingham that same year were met with Bull Connor’s fire hoses and police dog attacks and a church bombing that killed four young Black girls. These events horrified Americans and galvanized support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

The Civil Rights Act, however, failed to address the crucial right to vote. Like the rest of the Deep South, Alabama had in place a variety of hurdles, including poll taxes and capriciously applied literacy and Constitutional comprehension tests, which too often made voting difficult if not impossible for African-Americans, especially those below the poverty line.

In 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) established a presence in Selma and sought to register local African-Americans to vote. They were thwarted by segregationists who held the levers of local power, most notably Sheriff Jim Clark. In January 1965 Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the most prominent Civil Rights organization, joined the SNCC in Selma. Together, they planned a voting rights march to the Alabama State Capitol.

The Selma to Montgomery March was actually a series of three marches conducted in March 1965, of which only the third would reach its intended destination. The first attempt, on March 7, became known as Bloody Sunday, as Sheriff Clark unleashed nightstick-armed troopers on the unarmed crowd attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

Horrifying images of this attack made the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. President Lyndon Johnson summoned George Wallace to the White House for a tongue-lashing and federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers. Soon after, Johnson convened a joint session of Congress and put forward the Voting Rights Act, calling Selma “a turning point in man's unending search for freedom” and paraphrasing King in declaring, “really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” The Voting Rights Act was signed into law on August 6, 1965—a direct result of King’s efforts in Selma and an illustration of the power of unblinking photojournalism to effect real change in society.