On March 24, 1965, a march from the campus of City of St. Jude to the Alabama state capitol building in Montgomery marked the culmination of a campaign that transformed voting rights in the United States.
The historic event included more than 25,000 civil rights activists—including more than 3,000 people who had walked from Selma—who gathered and camped at the Catholic social service complex during the final leg of the third and final Selma-to-Montgomery march. On that last night of the multi-day protest, marchers camped on a rain-soaked field at St. Jude and drank in the music of some of the day’s biggest stars, including Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Sam Cooke, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Leonard Bernstein, Odetta Holmes, Nina Simone, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter, Paul and Mary.
Early the next morning, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the procession of marchers on a five-mile route to the state capitol. Decades later, on September 16, 2025, the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image of Montgomery, showing the ground the marchers covered. As documented in a series of aerial photographs, marchers departed from St. Jude in a long line, headed north toward downtown, turned east onto Dexter Avenue, passed the Baptist church where King was once a pastor, and concluded on the steps of the state capitol building (below).
From there, King gave his “How Long, Not Long” speech (also called Our God is Marching On), which many historians consider among his most consequential. On that warm, sunny day, he called out to the crowd assembled before him:
“I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’
Somebody’s asking, ‘How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and …