The March that Wouldn't Turn Around

In early 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) met at Birmingham’s A.G. Gaston Motel to plan a demonstration in protest of Jimmy Lee Jackson’s murder by an Alabama State Trooper and to petition for Black voting rights. Meeting delegates agreed on a march from Selma to Alabama’s state capitol in Montgomery to deliver a petition to Governor George Wallace. TIAL members including Gwen Patton attended this meeting at the invitation of SNCC’s Jim Forman. 

The planned march was supposed to begin in Selma on March 7 and end in Montgomery on March 10, where marchers from Tuskegee would meet up with the marchers from Selma. TIAL students raised funds and recruited marchers from Tuskegee Institute and other colleges and universities where they had connections. By early March, TIAL was ready to lead over 1,500 marchers to meet the Selma marchers at the Capitol in Montgomery on March 10. Some considered their leg of the march as the Eastern Black Belt Contingent. 

On March 7, however, Tuskegee Institute students watched media coverage of Bloody Sunday in horror and received firsthand reports of the violence inflicted on Selma marchers by Alabama State Troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The administration of Tuskegee Institute announced that students would not be allowed to participate in the planned March 10th march and distributed copies of a federal injunction which prohibited any marches to Montgomery until there could be a hearing. The SCLC and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. honored the injunction, and, as a result, a second march from Selma to Montgomery on Tuesday, March 9 turned around just after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. "Turnaround Tuesday" further convinced TIAL that they wanted to define their own terms for their freedom struggle. They decided they would march on the 10th, regardless of the injunction. Their march would not turn around. 

The morning of March 10, over 1,500 people from all over Macon County met at Thompkins Hall to participate in the caravan march to Montgomery. The marchers boarded buses and private cars and departed in a slow caravan to Montgomery. During the caravan, people would leave the vehicles to march for a while. Then, they would be picked up by cars, and other marchers would take their place. The marchers arrived at Montgomery’s First Baptist Church on North Ripley Street (also known as the “Brick-A-Day Church”) around 9:00 a.m. From there, they would march, two by two, to the state capitol to petition the governor for voting rights and demand first class citizenship. 

Governor George Wallace refused to accept the marchers’ petition or to meet with Tuskegee Institute student representatives. The students then staged a sit-in in front of the capitol until he would accept their petition or send a representative to meet with them. As night fell, around 300 students sat in front of the Capitol surrounded by police. Eventually, the temperature dropped, and rain began falling, so the demonstrators left the Capitol and spent the night on the basement floor of First Missionary Baptist Church. Jim Forman and other SNCC organizers brought them food and blankets. 

The next day, 600 students from Alabama State College joined the Tuskegee Institute students in their protest. 1,000 students marched to the Capitol to petition the governor, who again refused to accept the petition. That night, the marchers slept at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, even though church trustees cut off the heat, water, and lights overnight. 

March 12, high school students from George Washington Carver High School and St. Jude Catholic Hight School joined the Alabama State College students. As the group attempted to march from Jackson Street to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to join the Tuskegee students in their approach to the Capitol, they were met by police on horseback who beat them back. People in the neighborhood opened their homes to shelter students fleeing police violence. Students also fled to Jackson Street Baptist Church. Police surrounded the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, threatening violence, but eventually allowed the marchers to leave and get on their buses back to Tuskegee.

In the words of Gwen Patton in her book, My Race to Freedom: A Life in the Civil Rights Movement,

“The Tuskegee March that didn’t turn around had guaranteed that the Selma march would go forward because, as we had shown, people will march for their rights."

Photo (above): This photo is from a spread in the 1966 Tuskeana. The caption reads “We came from everywhere to demonstrate where it would do the most good.” (Tuskegee University Archives)

Photo (below): Students getting on buses for the caravan march, 1966 Tuskeana. (Tuskegee University Archives)

Video (below): Historical footage of the March 10 march and subsequent marches in the days before the Selma to Montgomery March. (Alabama Department of Archives and History)