AS WE SAT ON THE BUS TRAVEL-ing through Alabama, stopping at several historically significant sites of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, John Lewis and some of his fellow Freedom Riders shared firsthand accounts of what they experienced.
About 600 people, most of them Black, lined up on one side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the last Confederate general to serve in the U.S. Senate, who was also the leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. Their plan was to march more than 50 miles to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery and demand that Governor George Wallace protect Black Alabamans’ right to
