Selma To Montgomery National Historic Trail Opens The First Interpretive Center In August And Gains Funding For Selma Center
On August 25th the Lowndes County Interpretive Center will officially open its doors to the public. The center is dedicated to those who marched peacefully from Selma to Montgomery Alabama in order to gain the right to vote on March 21, 1965. The Center features an orientation film, wayside exhibits and life-size figures telling the stories of people’s personal experiences along on the March which motivated President Lyndon Johnson to push the voting rights bill through Congress. Wayside exhibits will look over the fields where Tent City sprang up. After the voting rights bill was enacted 20 African-American tenant farmers who tried to vote were evicted from the land they farmed. They established a tent city along the highway, in Lowndes County, where some families stayed as long as two years on land owned by African-Americans.
National Park Surperintendent Catherine Light says the interpretive center on this land is one of three proposed to enhance the telling of the trail’s story. It is made possible through collaborative efforts of the National Park Service, the Federal Highway Administration, and Alabama Department of Transportation.
A second center is planned in Selma, Alabama. On March 21, 2006, forty-one years after the historic 54-mile trek, Congressman Arthur Davis presented Selma Mayor James Perkins with a federal grant for more than a half million dollars for the development of the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights Trail Visitors and Interpretive Center in Selma. Property for the center has been purchased near the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Selma center is expected to open in 2007.
