Remembering a road trip to Selma 60 years ago
My classmates and I were eager to join the voting rights march to Montgomery. But how would we get to Alabama?
The plan we were pondering—as students at Ripon College in central Wisconsin, 60 years ago this month—seemed crazy at first. But it was the 1960s, and we were young and brimming with the idealism of the age. So we set out confidently to make our nascent plan a reality.
Almost a thousand miles away, in Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. was preparing to lead a 54-mile voting rights march to Montgomery, the state capital. It was a just cause, and we were eager to join in. But how would we get there, and how would we finance the trip?
As we were mulling it over, Patrick Hunt, the assistant dean of men at the college, received a call from Dan Friedlander, a student activist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He said that about 100 students from the university would be leaving for Selma soon on three chartered buses, and he asked whether any Ripon students might be interested in coming along.
