The museum exists because of Faya Ora Rose Toure and Marie Foster, two women who understood that memory is fragile. Toure, a civil rights attorney and activist, and Foster, a voting rights organizer who had spent years teaching Black citizens how to pass Alabama's deliberately impossible literacy tests, founded the museum in 1991. They recognized that the generation who had marched and bled was aging, and that the physical evidence of their struggle was scattering into attics and landfills. The museum opened its doors two years later, deliberately positioned near the bridge where state troopers had attacked peaceful marchers on March 7, 1965. Its mission statement reaches back further than Selma, honoring everyone who fought for the franchise since the Founding Fathers first planted the seeds of democracy in 1776, including the women's suffrage movement that secured women's right to vote.

The museum is organized as a series of rooms, each carrying a different weight. The "Footprints to Freedom" gallery holds the cast footprints of march participants, a visceral reminder that this history was walked, step by painful step, for 54 miles from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. The "Women's Suffrage Room" honors the contributions of African American and other women who fought for voting rights, a thread that runs from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 through the Selma marches and beyond. The "Selma Room," also known as the "Marie Foster Room" in honor of the museum's co-founder, displays voting records, clothing worn by people beaten during the march, and other artifacts of the movement. A large reproduction of an iconic photograph taken during the march by Look magazine photographer James Karales dominates one wall, capturing the silhouetted line of marchers against the Alabama sky.

Perhaps the museum's most powerful space is the room where participants in the 1960s marches can leave personal messages and chronicle their memories. This is not a static archive. It is a living document, growing with each visit from someone who was there. The accounts are handwritten, unedited, and raw. They describe fear and courage in the same paragraph. They name neighbors who were beaten and strangers who offered water. They record the small details that official histories overlook: the sound of horses' hooves on pavement, the sting of tear gas in the throat, the long walk back to Selma after the troopers charged. These first-person testimonies transform the museum from a collection of objects into a conversation across generations, connecting visitors directly to the voices of those who risked everything for a ballot.

The museum's location is no accident. Step outside and you are standing at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the exact spot where 600 marchers set out on Bloody Sunday and where state troopers were waiting on the other side. On March 7, 1965, those marchers were beaten and gassed as television cameras broadcast the violence into American living rooms. The national outrage that followed helped push the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress that summer. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law, and the legal architecture of voter suppression across the South began to crumble. The museum sits in the shadow of that bridge as a deliberate act of witness. It says: this happened here. These people did this. And the democracy you participate in today was purchased at this price.