The Faces of Selma, 50 Years Later

Bloomberg Politics traveled to Alabama to find people who lived a landmark civil rights event: They were there on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, or marched from Selma to Montgomery afterward. We found unflappable women—now community leaders—who were unflappable schoolgirls at the time. We found a man who had stayed up all night watching the wounded pour into Good Samaritan Hospital, which he later ran. And we found Martin Luther King Jr.’s barber, the man who cut King’s hair for a decade, including just weeks before he was shot and killed. Though progress has been made, half a century later, Selma itself is still struggling, and the country still grapples with the painful legacy of racism. On pain, marcher Bennie Ruth Crenshaw said, “I remember some of my classmates saying to me, ‘We may get hurt.’ And I said ‘We're already hurting.’” This is their story.