Today we traveled from Montgomery to Selma to further our education about civil rights, specifically about the March for voting rights. The ride was only a little over an hour which is nothing for us at this point in our trip. As we traveled along the rolling hills the beauty of Alabama and the rural environment became very apparent. Having spent my whole life in the suburbs outside of Manhattan I truly enjoyed the country scenery. We drove over the bridge in Selma and immediately saw the devastation. Every other store front was vacant and few cars filled the streets. It was apparent the white population had relocated and the majority of the population was African American. We attended a voting museum that explained more of the history of the march for voting rights. As we pulled up to a drug store the vacant store fronts had danger signs in the front windows warning that the building had been deemed unstable and able to collapse at any moment.
Prior to our trip I had learned from Diane Shaw that Marquis De Lafayette had an important role in the civil rights movement and actually had a monument in Selma. We tried to find this monument and eventually found the small plaque that stated the importance of Lafayette in the movement. It was cool to see that the founder of our school had played a role in the movement we were studying.
Then we traveled to Atlanta from Selma and the traffic made it apparent we were no longer in Alabama and had entered the city!