History Was Made in Selma—But Not For Selma

Most weekdays for the last 10 years, Letasha Irby, 36, has driven her car across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., to get to a job that pays $11.33 an hour. The black mother of two lives about a 20-minute drive from the iconic bridge, which is named in honor of a Reconstruction-era Alabama Ku Klux Klan leader and U.S. senator and is the spot where demonstrators were set upon by police in an event that's come to be known as Bloody Sunday.

The events of March 7, 1965 cleared the way for an historic march from Selma to Montgomery and passage of the federal Voting Rights Act. But Irby says she never much thought about what had happened in Selma and how it might have shaped her destiny until the past year, when she became more involved in an effort to unionize her shop, which makes auto parts. And not until Oprah Winfrey came to town earlier this year to promote Hollywood’s movie about the struggle did Irby ever get out of the car and cross the bridge on foot to trace the steps of the marchers who were tear-gassed, beaten, and trampled by horses after orders from Governor George Wallace, and the steps of the thousands who crossed two weeks later with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. She was struck by how many more details she noticed on foot: The beauty of the Alabama River below, and the weight of an unfulfilled promise that still hangs over the city.