Hiking With History: A Pilgrimage Along the Selma to Montgomery Trail & The St. James Hotel

What can we learn from retracing the steps of the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama? One traveler laces up his boots.

I’m exactly zero steps into a 54-mile walk, and already I’m dawdling too much, distracted from effective time management by the history around me. Above my head soars Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, a beautiful, twin-towered structure that served as a hub of civil rights activism in the 1960s—Malcolm X delivered one of his final talks here—and now serves as the starting point for Alabama’s Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. Even though I won’t technically begin my walk until the next morning, I already feel I’m on a religious pilgrimage.

I studied human rights and, ever since, have venerated the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. It is this reverence that marks the 54-mile route that thousands of nonviolent civil rights protestors, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marched in 1965. Established by Congress in 1996, the trail also connects sites, including Brown Chapel, crucial to the lives of Dr. King and other secular saints of the Civil Rights Movement. From the church, I’ll follow the path—which isn’t a hiking trail but rather the rural, four-lane Highway 80 that protestors walked—ending in Montgomery, Alabama, the state’s capitol.

While the original participants took five days to complete the walk (attracting more media coverage, and marchers, each day), life demands that I complete the journey in two. I plan to walk 27 miles per day, catching rides back to Selma at night, as many of the 1965 marchers did, and picking up my trail the following morning. I’ve packed lightly, leaning into the journey’s pilgrimage potential by downloading civil rights speeches and memoirs of iconic leaders. As I make my solo march, I want their powerful words ringing in my ears.

The St. James Hotel was built in 1837 on the banks of the Alabama River.

I’ve selected the St. James Hotel, a balcony-frocked historic hotel on the city’s waterfront, as my home base for the weekend. The hotel, I discover, is not the only attractive part of Selma. If not for its violent history, I might instead be absorbed by Selma’s small-town architectural charm. The town is curled on the north shore of a bend in the Alabama River, and its main street holds midcentury buildings, striped awnings, and vintage signs that suggest an America that never existed except in popular nostalgia and the paintings by Norman Rockwell. It’s not all quaint charisma, of course. I also spot Baby Yoda car decals, flags advertising CBD oil, and the other hallmarks of 2020s American culture. Still, there exists a certain pre-strip-mall appeal.

Wandering among the streets, churches, and civic buildings that served as the daily settings for Selma’s prolonged struggle for equality, I’m reminded of the everyday oppressions that preceded the march. After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, equal voting rights continued to elude many Black Americans in towns and cities that had previously propped up legalized segregation. Black citizens were prevented from registering by white officials using such suppression tactics as “literacy tests” with questions like “how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” (Such “tests” were almost never proctored to white applicants.) Even worse, the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante injustice groups sometimes threatened potential voters’ lives.

To draw national attention to the problems, civil rights activists from around the country joined those in Selma for a march to the capitol in Montgomery. Their first attempt, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, ended at the Edmund Pettus Bridge when state troopers and a posse of deputized civilians attacked the 600-strong crowd of nonviolent marchers with electric cattle prods and tear gas. Photographs from this “Bloody Sunday” outraged the nation. Marchers made a second attempt on Tuesday, March 9, but they, too, turned around at the bridge, this time without bloodshed. Finally, two weeks after Bloody Sunday, on March 21, more than 3,000 marchers left Selma and would go on to successfully complete the five-day march to Montgomery.