City of St. Jude: The Night Before Montgomery
Near Montgomery, Alabama
On March twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-five, an athletic field here at the City of Saint Jude became the staging ground for one of the most remarkable nights of the civil rights movement. Thousands of marchers, on the final night of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, camped on these grounds. Then the Stars for Freedom rally began: Harry Belafonte had organized a makeshift stage built from coffin-shipping crates and plywood, and onto it stepped Mahalia Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr.
, Tony Bennett, Joan Baez, Nina Simone, Peter Paul and Mary, and Leonard Bernstein. The next morning, twenty-five thousand people rose and walked the final miles to the Alabama State Capitol. Saint Jude itself was founded by a Catholic priest in the nineteen thirties as a hospital and school serving Black Alabamans locked out of segregated care.
