Carver Homes - Where the Marchers Gathered
A stop on Selma: Bloody Sunday and the Vote, a free self-guided tour.
The apartments around you are the George Washington Carver Homes, a segregated public housing development built after World War II and named for the famed African American scientist. In 1965 this neighborhood was the movement's home base. Families here opened their doors to SNCC and SCLC workers and to the volunteers who poured into Selma, feeding them and giving them places to sleep, often at real risk to their own jobs and safety.
On the afternoon of March 7, 1965, marchers gathered on the playground of the Carver Homes and lined up in pairs for the walk to the bridge. Photographer Spider Martin captured them there, waiting in their long double line for the signal to begin. When they came back that evening, hurt and shaken, it was this community that took them in.
Take a moment here. These are ordinary homes, and the ordinary people living in them made an extraordinary chapter of American history possible.
Getting here: Head back down Martin Luther King Jr. Street toward Brown Chapel; the Carver Homes surround the church, with the largest part of the neighborhood just to its west.
Did you know?: The City of Selma accepted federal funds in 1952 to build the Carver Homes, so the neighborhood was barely a decade old when the marchers lined up here.
Photo op: Respect residents' privacy: photograph from the sidewalk, with Brown Chapel's towers rising above the rooftops.
More on Wikipedia: Selma to Montgomery marches · George Washington Carver · Spider Martin
Stops on this tour
- Brown Chapel AME Church - Where the Marches Began
- First Baptist Church - The Movement's Open Door
- Carver Homes - Where the Marchers Gathered
- Martin Luther King Jr. Street - A Street of Memory
- Dallas County Courthouse - The Long Lines to Vote
- Selma Interpretive Center - At the Foot of the Bridge
- Edmund Pettus Bridge - Bloody Sunday
- National Voting Rights Museum - The Road to the Vote