Selma, Alabama

We drove south from our campsite in Pelham, south of Birmingham, through the countryside. A lot of it was timberlands, some cut and some replanted, and a lot of farmland. In Mapleville we saw a convenience store named “The Barking Frog”.

The National Park Service Interpretive Center in Selma is small, but effectively conveys the history of the Marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, with false starts and confrontations.

We walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge out of Selma to a park on the east side with a variety of monuments to the marchers and to unknown slaves. The Lynching in Selma sign by the Equal Justice Initiative was the first clue we had about The National Memorial for Peace and Justice that we would see in Montgomery.

We returned to the Selma side of the bridge and set out along the historic trail from Selma to Montgomery. We arrived at the home of our friends Tara and Jim and had a delicious typical southern cooking dinner at Martin’s Restaurant in Montgomery.