The population of the small town of Selma, Alabama, will swell fivefold when visitors arrive on 8 March to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, one of the most brutal episodes in America’s civil rights era.
They will march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where, on 7 March 1965, state troopers with truncheons and tear gas charged 600 non-violent protesters marching towards Montgomery, injuring more than 50 and leaving campaigner Amelia Boynton lying unconscious in the road. Television images of the events shocked the nation, prompted further marches in Selma led by Martin Luther King, and spurred the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“This will be the largest number of people ever in Selma,” said tourism director Ashley Mason. “We’re close to 100,000, about twice what it has been on past anniversaries.”
The film Selma, based on the events and starring British actor David Oyelowo as Dr King, opens this weekend in the UK.In Selma, accommodation for the anniversary has been fully booked since early last year. That’s several months before it gained momentum from a new generation of protesters invoking the spirit of its historic marches.
(Poignantly, the New York premiere took place on the same weekend as the city’s protest march in response to the deaths at the hands of police of two unarmed black men: local man Eric Garner, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.)
Across the south, museums to the civil rights movement mark ordinary places where extraordinary moments of tragedy and courage occurred – and more are planned. Selma has two small museums, the National Voting Rights Museum & Institute and the Selma Interpretive Center, located either side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Greensboro, North Carolina, opened its International Civil Rights Center & Museum in 2010 on the spot where, 50 years earlier, four young black students sat at a “whites only” lunch counter, then returned each day in greater numbers until the store was desegregated.
The motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 is now the National Civil Rights Museum, which reopened last year after a $27.5m renovation. In June, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights opened in Atlanta, with interactive exhibits recalling civil rights milestones of the 1950s and 60s, and human rights struggles that continue today. Unlike older museums it is not located on a historic site but in the city centre, neighbouring the Georgia Aquarium and World of Coca-Cola museum.
Next year, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opens in Washington DC, while other museums in the pipeline include the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, slated to open in time for the state’s bicentennial in 2017, and, in 2018, the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, where tens of thousands of slaves first set foot on American soil.
For now, the spotlight is on Selma, as it prepares for its extended jubilee weekend – to be attended by President Obama – and for the 50th anniversary of the successful march to Montgomery later in the month. The first African-American president has been in office for the 50-year anniversaries of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act.
