Maybe even more important for a Civil Rights experience than the Lorraine Motel, TN, or Jackson, MS, or possibly Greensboro, NC, is Selma, AL. Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden have walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge to celebrate the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and honor the marchers, including the late Representative John Lewis.

I had thought Selma was just a one-stop-light town outside of Montgomery. I learned the march was organized in part because of the shooting by police of Jimmie Lee Jackson (echoes of Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, or George Floyd) in Marion, about thirty miles away. Selma, however, has a deep history in Alabama. 

Since statehood, Selma and Dallas County had been important to the nascent state. The first state capital was in Cahaba, barely 14 miles away to the southeast. Due to flooding, the capital moved to Montgomery, and the county seat to Selma. Cahaba lay abandoned. Selma prospered. Not only as a port on the Alabama River but also as an industrial center. During the Civil War, Selma, after Richmond, produced the most munitions for the CSA. Its Naval foundry also built ironclads, the new armored warships introduced in the war. Today, in addition to its Civil Rights history, it boasts one of the most intact historic districts in the South. 

The road traveling from Montgomery to Selma, in the opposite direction of the march, appears flat. Uninteresting, until just before Lowdens Interpretive Center, a National Park Service Museum on the marchers’ route. There the road is at the crest looking down to Selma in Dallas County and, on a clear day, you can see the rolling hills between the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers. The center is just beyond Lowdensboro where Viola Liuzzo was murdered transporting marchers back from Montgomery. 

Route 80, the marcher’s path, is a major dual carriageway highway between Montgomery and Selma. It rolls through farmland, perhaps not as farmed as over fifty years ago but still with enough sense of the land where the marchers camped overnight, identified by National Park Service markers. Suddenly, the road ends, so to speak, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It looks as it does in all the photos I have seen so often so recently. It is uncanny how much the bridge looks like its portrait especially as it is an unassuming bridge in architecture or transportation. It is not the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate, or the Mighty Mac — it is a serviceable functional steel arch truss bridge, designed by a local, Henson Stephenson. The bridge is not symmetrical – it rises from east to west because Selma is on a bluff above the river and the east bank. 

The National Park Center in Selma is closed until 2028 — a local guide intimates that it is the current administration exercising its disfavor with the voting franchise as the cause. But the bridge still stands, next to the oldest pre-Civil War hotel, the St. James, a classic three-story building with multi-story porches, also recently closed but this argued as a pure business decision. I am here to make my pilgrimage and cross the bridge.

I began the walk from the Selma side, just like the marchers, but on the sidewalk, not in the road. The arch does not begin until a substantial way across. It is made of heavy metal, recently painted, a silver color, not a contemporary metal made to oxidize. The arch is heavy. It has none of the lightness of a suspension bridge nor the enviable setting of the Sydney Harbor Bridge. It is a functional bridge to carry four lanes of traffic across a river and provide pedestrian access on either side. The purposeful railing has decorative elements but no suicide barrier. At height, it is only one hundred feet above the water. The traffic seems to go faster, especially coming up from the eastern bank, as though the drivers have gunned the cars to crest the center span. 

Only when I came down the east side did the feeling of hastening traffic make sense. Along with the drama of the photographs, and I expect the horrified confusion of the marchers on Bloody Sunday, the descent from the west to the east is sharp – as noted, the bridge is not symmetrical. You glide up from the Selma side but rush down onto the east bank. The original marchers stopped by the police became a barrier to those behind who had to not only fight their fear to return but also gravity that wanted them down and off the bridge. 

It is unusually disconcerting to traverse a bridge where one side is a steep change in attitude and the other a gentle transition.