Hugh A. Carson was born into slavery, became one of only three Black delegates at Alabama's 1875 constitutional convention, and built a farm along Highway 80 east of Lowndesboro. Ninety years later, his grandson Robert Gardner offered that same land as a campsite to the thousands of marchers walking from Selma to Montgomery. The four campsites used during the five-day march in March 1965 are not just rest stops on a historic trail. They are monuments to the Black families, churches, and institutions that opened their doors when the cost of doing so could be measured in burned homes, lost livelihoods, and worse.
By the third day of the march, on March 23, 1965, a steady rain had turned the Alabama countryside into a sodden gauntlet. The marchers arrived at the Gardner farm caked in mud, exhausted from walking Highway 80 under gray skies. Two sleeping tents and a medical tent went up north of the driveway, a food tent to the south. Tuskegee University students arrived with hot meals. Marchers wrung out their clothes and dried them around portable heaters, huddled together in tents that leaked and sagged. The farm's driveway runs off a side road now named Frederick Douglass Road, a quiet acknowledgment of the history layered into this landscape. At 7 a.m. the next morning, the marchers rose and crossed into Montgomery County. The Gardner property remains in the family today and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023.
The final campsite told a different story. On March 24, the marchers reached the City of St. Jude, a Roman Catholic church, school, and hospital complex on the outskirts of Montgomery. Established in 1937 as a social service center for the city's Black community, St. Jude held a distinction: when its hospital opened in 1951, it was the first fully integrated hospital in Alabama. That evening, as tents filled the grounds and marchers found warm beds in the complex's facilities, Harry Belafonte organized what became known as the Stars for Freedom Rally. An estimated 25,000 people gathered as Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Baez, Nina Simone, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Frankie Laine performed under the Alabama night sky. The music rang across the grounds, fueling the resolve that would carry the marchers the final miles to the state capitol the following morning.
The march campsites reveal something often overlooked in the grand narrative of civil rights: the immense personal risk borne by the Black families and landowners who provided shelter. Robert Gardner's decision to host the marchers was not spontaneous. His brother-in-law, A. G. Gaston, one of the wealthiest Black businessmen in Alabama, suggested the farm to march organizers. The Gardner land carried a lineage of resistance. Hugh A. Carson, Robert's grandfather, had served in the Alabama House of Representatives during Reconstruction, one of the few Black men to hold such power in the state. The family home, built between 1900 and 1912, stood as proof that Black landowners had deep roots in Lowndes County, a place where only 300 marchers were permitted to proceed through under court order.
On the morning of March 25, 1965, the marchers departed St. Jude for the final stretch to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. What had begun five days earlier at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma had swelled from hundreds to roughly 25,000 people. The 54-mile route along Highway 80, now designated the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, passes through some of Alabama's most unassuming countryside. From the air, the landscape is flat, agricultural, and quiet. But the fields along this corridor hold a weight that no topographic map can capture. The City of St. Jude complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. The trail itself was established by Congress in 1996. Together, the campsites form a chain of landmarks that mark not just where people slept, but where a movement gathered its strength.
Located at 32.33N, 86.95W, in Lowndes County, Alabama, along the U.S. Highway 80 corridor between Selma and Montgomery. Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 feet AGL to trace the march route along the highway. The flat agricultural terrain makes the road corridor easy to follow. Nearest airports: Montgomery Regional Airport (KMGM) approximately 20 nm east, Craig Field (KSEM) in Selma approximately 25 nm west. The Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail follows Highway 80 for 54 miles and is visible as a straight east-west corridor through the Black Belt region.