His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

This chapter highlights the culmination of Lewis’s career with the SNCC: the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The voter registration drives of 1964 included Alabama as well as Mississippi, where Lewis began working in early 1965. Other civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, visited Selma as well to draw attention to the voting rights barriers there, and tensions were high. King was attacked, though not hurt, in the lobby of a hotel, and the county sheriff roughed up one of the movement’s veterans, a middle-aged woman. At the end of February, a Black man was shot after defending his mother from state troopers who broke up a peaceful march. The man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, died a week later. After Jackson’s funeral, King wanted to march from Selma to Montgomery to push for a federal voting rights bill. This split the movement considerably because some saw it as grandstanding that would accomplish little or nothing. While some SNCC leaders opposed the march, Lewis himself decided to participate.

Alabama governor George Wallace vowed that the march would not happen and directed state troopers to prevent it by any means. On Sunday, March 7, the marchers met at Brown Chapel AME Church.