Villanova students to visit Selma

DELAWARE COUNTY

Students to visit Selma

VILLANOVA Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, 12 Villanova University students are scheduled to spend their spring break this week traveling to Alabama on a civil rights pilgrimage. They are set to visit several historic landmarks in the state.

Two university administrators and a history professor are slated to accompany the students as they walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where police beat protesters trying to march to the state Capital in Montgomery on March 7, 1965, a date that became known as "Bloody Sunday."

The participants are also scheduled to visit the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, and the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where a bombing in 1963 killed four schoolgirls.

An official commemorative march to celebrate the anniversary of Bloody Sunday will be held on Sunday, but the group will not be able to attend in order to return to school. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches are widely considered to have helped lead to passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965. The movie Selma, about the marches, was recently nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. - John Moritz