Sixty years ago today the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March concluded with Martin Luther King Jr. speaking before a crowd of 25,000 on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. It was a triumphal moment for the civil rights movement that would lead to the August passage of the V oting Rights Act of 1965. I was a bit player in the Selma March, but when I look back on it, I still feel lucky to have been there at all. My memory of the March starts at its beginning on early Sunday morning, March 21. I even remember that future U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young — he was Andy then — was wearing a blue work shirt and no jacket despite the early morning chill. Young, part of a small group of organizers from the King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was doing his best to get everyone lined up for the March. Estimates later put the size of the first day’s March at 3,200. But as we milled around Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the gathering point for the beginning of the March, it felt as if there were barely enough of us to fill a high school auditorium. In downtown Selma, a “Coonsville USA” sign was waiting for us, and “Bye, Bye Black Bird” was blaring over a car’s stereo system. The Alabama National Guard, which had been federalized by President Lyndon Johnson to protect the march, lined U.S. Highway 80 after we left Selma and crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But the guard’s presence only heightened the anger of the white spectators standing behind them. I remember young kids standing next to their parents giving us the finger. In the spring of 1965, I was in graduate school at Brown University. I had no plans to come to Selma. What changed for me was seeing television footage of the “Bloody Sunday” events of March 7 when a sheriff’s posse, along with Alabama state troopers, attacked and clubbed a group of voting rights marchers led by John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I made up my mind soon after to join a new voting rights march scheduled for March 21, this one to be led by King. On the Saturday before the March, friends drove me to the airport, and I boarded a plane for Montgomery, not knowing how I would actually get to Selma. As luck would have it, several others on the plane were headed for Selma, and in Montgomery we were able to rent a car and drive to Selma. There an elderly Black couple, risking getting fired by their white employers for taking us in, let us sleep in their living room for the next few nights.  The first day of the March covered seven miles. Then we turned around and got rides back to Selma. It was not until Monday that the kind of danger that surrounded the March and would take the lives of three people — Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black Alabaman, the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, and Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights activist from Detroit — hit home for me. Early in the morning I joined with a dozen or so volunteers to help clear the pasture where the small cadre of marchers who would make the full trip from Selma to Montgomery were due to camp that night. We had just begun clearing the pasture when a caravan of cars pulled up along the highway, and everything changed. We were too far away to make out the words the men in the cars were shouting, but we could see their raised fists and the rebel flags draped over the hoods of the cars. Hemmed in by the barbed wire surrounding the pasture, we had no place to run. We could only hope the men in the cars did not have guns. I felt afraid — as deeply as I have ever been in my life — then relief in knowing this was where I wanted to be no matter what happened next. I often think back to that moment, but the picture that for me sums up my time in Selma and my belief in its legacy is a newspaper photo, a grainy panoramic shot of all us marching along U.S. 80. No single person stands out. We blend together, a Black-and-white human chain for all to see. Mills is author of “Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964 — The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.” He is professor of American literature at Sarah Lawrence College. ...read more read less