Martin Luther King Jr. Street - A Street of Memory
A stop on Selma: Bloody Sunday and the Vote, a free self-guided tour.
As you walk south along Martin Luther King Jr. Street, look for the memorials and markers along the way. Twenty memorials, churches and wayside exhibits make up the Martin Luther King Jr. Street Historic Walking Tour, and together they tell the story of the voting rights movement in the place where it happened.
In 1965 this was Sylvan Street. Photographs from that winter and spring show it crowded with people: demonstrators singing in front of Brown Chapel, lines forming for the walk downtown, and lawmen watching from the curb. In 1976 the city renamed it for Dr. King.
The markers honor national figures, but they also tell the stories of local people, the teachers, ministers, students and working families who risked their livelihoods to stand up and be counted. Stop at a few of them, read the names, and picture the street as it was, filled with people determined to vote.
Getting here: Continue south on Martin Luther King Jr. Street past Brown Chapel; markers appear along both sides of the street.
Did you know?: The first street in the country named for Dr. King was in Chicago in 1968. Selma renamed Sylvan Street, the street the marches started from, eight years later.
Photo op: Frame one of the markers with the street stretching away behind it toward downtown.
More on Wikipedia: Martin Luther King Jr. · List of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr.
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