I'm Walkin' For My Freedom

“I’ve 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.

The exhibit’s photos convey both the march and its immediate impact: the Voting Rights Act, signed in August 1965 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.

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