Civil Rights History Under Threat at National Parks

On March 7, 1965, approximately 600 marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. State troopers attacked them with batons, tear gas, and whips. Lewis suffered a skull fracture. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized. The footage, broadcast nationally, shocked the country. Two weeks later, Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 marchers on the 54-mile route from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, citing "the outrage of Selma."

The "Tent City" exhibit shown above documents what happened next. In Lowndes County, landowners evicted Black sharecroppers who had registered to vote. Over 40 families were forced to live in army surplus tents on seven acres along Highway 80, without running water or electricity, repeatedly attacked by the Klan. They lived there for over two years. The exhibit panels that tell this story have been flagged for revision.

On May 14, 1961, a mob of 50 armed men attacked a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders outside Anniston, Alabama, smashing windows and slashing tires before firebombing the bus. Riders barely escaped with their lives. That same day, Klan members beat riders at the Birmingham bus station in a 15-minute frenzy while police deliberately vacated the area. On May 20, several hundred attacked riders at the Montgomery bus station with baseball bats and pipes. The rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and continued by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) under Diane Nash.

The Freedom Rides succeeded. On November 1, 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled segregation on interstate buses and facilities illegal. The Freedom Riders National Monument was designated by President Obama on January 12, 2017. The 26 exhibit panels now flagged for review document one of the most consequential acts of nonviolent protest in American history.

Medgar Evers became the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi in 1954. He organized voter registration drives, investigated racial violence — including the murder of Emmett Till — and fought for the desegregation of schools and public facilities across the state. On June 12, 1963, white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith shot him in the back in his own driveway at 2332 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive in Jackson. Two all-white juries deadlocked in 1964. It took 31 years — until February 5, 1994 — for Beckwith to finally be convicted of murder.

Myrlie Evers, who had worked alongside Medgar as the NAACP's secretary and researcher, went on to become the first woman to chair the NAACP board of directors in 1995. The home was designated a National Monument in 2019 and formally established in 2020. Three interpretive entries about the Evers family's story have been confirmed removed.