The Bridge to Tomorrow.

Selma, Alabama, in the spring of 1965, was charged with tension and hope. Black citizens protested, marched, and attempted to vote for weeks, and were jailed, intimidated, and denied. One of them was Sarah Johnson, a 23-year-old high school teacher whose voice could soothe a mob but whose soul craved justice.

Sarah was raised on the Deep South plantations, a sharecropping child of a son of a man who was himself born into slavery. Voting wasn't political to her—it was about self-respect. "If we can read, work, and pay taxes," her father would say, "then we can vote.".

Sarah marched on Sunday, 7th March, with a group of more than 600 marchers. They were accompanied by Hosea Williams and John Lewis and marched non-violently down the march route in Selma to the state capital at Montgomery. They took nothing with them except coats, sandwiches, and the weight of forty years of oppression. She did take a Bible with her and waved it above her head.

When they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they encountered a line of Alabama state troopers. Sheriff Jim Clark set his jaw unyielding in uniform. "You are ordered to disperse!" a trooper yelled. Nobody dispersed, though.

What followed would come to be known as "Bloody Sunday."

The troopers charged, batons, bullwhips, and tear gas. Sarah stumbled, Bible torn from her grasp, into the air. She watched others running from the smoke, crying, bleeding. A boot struck her ribs, and a burning stab of pain tore through her frame. But even as she fought toward safety, she never wavered from her faith—and her mission.

They sprang to life on American television that evening. Sarah and other women like her were beaten on Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles sidewalks for just walking there. America gasped. Fuming with anger and seething with indignation was President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Two days later, another march, this one sanctioned by the court. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched with them but withdrew when not so much a matter of judicial confidence was achieved. But Sarah marched and marched and marched until at last, with the National Guard and federal protection guaranteed, they marched all 54 miles of Selma to Montgomery.

On the stairs of the Alabama Capitol, Sarah was among the thousands to hear Dr. King speak these words: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." She had already known that it was true.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law soon after, approving the constitutionally racist voting qualifications that had barred Black Americans from the ballot for centuries. Sarah voted at last in November, weeping as she affixed her signature.

Years passed. Sarah went on teaching, instilling the faith in voice and vote in her children. She instructed them on the bridge—the terror, the bravery, the fellowship. She instructed them that history didn't read books. It was something built by ordinary men and women who chose to stand despite the cost being prohibitive.

And on every election day, even in her 80s, Sarah used to walk that short distance to her voting booth with that Bible clutched tightly in her hand—the very same Bible she lost on this bridge, dented and full of history.