I’m Walkin’ For My Freedom

“I’m Walkin’ For My Freedom” is a traveling exhibit of forty black-and-white photos and eight panels of didactic text. Envisioned, created, and curated by the nationally celebrated civil rights photographer Matt Herron (1932-2020), the exhibit depicts the Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights, widely recognized as the most significant of all the civil rights marches in the Deep South, and the one that led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the 54-mile march began in Selma and lasted five days: Sunday, March 21 to Thursday, March 25, 1965. About 4000 people began the march on that Sunday in Selma; by the time the march entered Montgomery, the state’s capital, the marchers had swelled to an exuberant throng of 22,000, including Americans from across the nation and hundreds of ordinary Black folk from Alabama.

Herron, who photographed the entire march, wrote: “The sight of thousands of Black demonstrators marching freely and without fear through the heart of Alabama must have caused many white Alabamans to doubt the evidence before their eyes. It was a sight most never expected to see, and it changed Alabama and the South forever.”

Herron originally arrived in Alabama in 1963. Over the next three years, he photographed and documented the expanding civil rights movement, devoting a great deal of his time to working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose Selma-based voter-registration strategy set the stage for the march.

For this exhibit, Herron used his extensive movement experience to select images that depict the multi-faceted aspects of the march—the diversity of people; the role of music; the presence of federal troops; the determination of young and old; the response of angry Whites restrained by the military; the expressions of joy along the way; and, finally, the guardedly triumphant conclusion, where Dr. King memorably stated: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

The exhibit’s final five photos convey the immediate impact of the Voting Rights Act, signed in August by President Lyndon B. Johnson. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act allowed US Marshals to move into the South and immediately register Black voters. It also required that any voting jurisdiction that engaged in egregious voting discrimination in 1965 could not enact any new voting requirements without first getting approval from the Justice Department.

The Voting Rights Act stayed in place for forty-eight years, or until 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the requirement for federal approval for new voting laws in the case, Shelby County v. Holder, proclaiming that protections were no longer necessary in a “post-racial” America. Immediately following Shelby, various local jurisdictions in the South enacted new voter restrictions. The recently proposed John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act both seek to restore and strengthen parts of the 1965 Act, and expand voter registration and voting access. Upcoming elections will continue to determine whether the sacred right of each citizen to cast a ballot still holds true in our country.