Every day, Marcus Rush walks by the Byzantine architecture of the Brown Chapel AME Church, where thousands of people once started a 54-mile trek that would change the nation.
Every day, he passes the imposing granite monument on the church's front sidewalk immortalizing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., another reminder of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march that inspired passage of the Voting Rights Act.Still, amid 30th anniversary events and a commemorative march that begins at the church Sunday, the 21-year-old who lives at a public housing project across the street wonders what all the fuss is about.
Even such a momentous episode - guaranteeing blacks access to the ballot booth in a region where they once were slaves - doesn't have much relevance three decades later to a jobless black man.
"I don't know too much about it," Rush said. "That was before my time."
As it was for 32-year-old Lee Marshall, who calls the famous march "ancient history."
"I'm just trying to make it in this world," Marshall said. "I'm just trying to survive before this world comes to an end. It's almost there with some of the things that are going on, the crime and drugs and all that."
The troubles of the day were different on March 7, 1965, as hundreds of protesters set out from the Selma church, attempting to march to the state Capitol in Montgomery for a voting rights demonstration.
Instead, they barely made it out of downtown Selma before getting mauled at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge by a posse of lawmen. The unforgiving use of billy clubs and tear gas provided one of the grimmest, goriest spectacles of the civil rights movement.
Two weeks after "Bloody Sunday" horrified the nation, King and others led a second march authorized by a federal judge and protected by thousands of federal troops.
Later that year, Congress approved the law that ensured blacks would no longer be denied the right to vote through chicanery or intimidation across the South.
"Of all the things that have happened in our lifetime, this is the single most historic piece of legislation ever passed," said Joe Smitherman, a white who was mayor then. Now, drawing a modicum of black support, he's still mayor.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who suffered a blow to the head on "Bloody Sunday," will be among those participating in Sunday's ceremonies. The commemorative march begins at the church, goes over the bridge again and culminates Saturday at the Alabama Capitol.
Like many U.S. cities, Selma is a town divided along racial lines. Blacks and whites may chat amiably on a downtown street corner during working hours, but public schools, churches, and the Elks Club, among other things, remain segregated.