The March Arrives, March 25, 1965
Near Montgomery, Alabama
On March twenty-fifth, nineteen sixty-five, twenty-five thousand people walked the last four miles into Montgomery, completing a march that had begun fifty-four miles away in Selma four days earlier. They came down Dexter Avenue and stopped at the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, the same building where Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated one hundred four years before.
The previous night, the marchers had camped on the athletic field of the City of St. Jude, a Catholic complex on the west side of Montgomery that had been the first fully integrated hospital in Alabama when it opened in nineteen fifty-one. A rally called Stars for Freedom was held on those grounds that evening. Harry Belafonte organized it. The performers included Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, and Nina Simone.
On the morning of March twenty-fifth, the column set out for the final stretch. Federal troops, National Guard units, and FBI personnel provided protection that had been absent two weeks earlier, when state troopers had beaten marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what became known as Bloody Sunday.
At the capitol steps, Martin Luther King delivered the speech now called How Long, Not Long. Drawing from the Book of Amos and from the abolitionist Theodore Parker, King said the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. He asked how long injustice would last. His answer: not long.
Five months later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of August sixth, nineteen sixty-five, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices and authorized federal oversight of elections in states with histories of voter suppression.
