March 4th 2012
March Over The Edmund Pettus Bridge
This was definitely a day i will remember for the rest of my life! It started very slowly and slightly traumatic. This was my birthday weekend and we had a tornado warning in Tuscaloosa on my actual birthday, therefore all my celebrations had to wait until the Saturday night. So the morning after I was a little worse for ware and was the only one insured to drive the car so we had to wait until the afternoon to drive to Selma. Five of us went on the trip, me, Anika, Angela, Amy and Sophie! None of us knew what to expect, all we knew was that a jubilee march was taking place across the Edmund Pettus bridge which had taken place every year since the march took place in the 60s. The atmosphere was very friendly and even though we were the extreme minority, no body seemed to be looking at us and we slowly just slid into the crowd. There were thousands of people congregating at the Martin Luther King Church to watch the pre march rally. We saw Martin Luther King III speak and Jessie Jackson which was amazing. Its a bit cereal to stand and watch these people speak in person when, for the last two years, I have been studying them through textbooks and journals in Leicester!
The actual march took place after the rally and we walked the route that the original marchers took through down town Selma. The mixture of people that were there was pretty amazing. It was not just black people, there were white, young and old, Mexican, Asian, men and women. All people walking through the streets together. We turned the corner onto the straight road towards the Edmund Pettus Bridge and I nearly cried. It was a bit like being inside a history book. We walked up and over the bridge with everyone and spent a while taking in the atmosphere then walked back to the main street. There was a festival type celebration in the centre and it really felt like we were in a different country! The vivid images, I will remember forever.
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