Dozens of activists retraced a Civil Rights-era route in Montgomery, Alabama on May 16, 2026, arriving on Dexter Avenue to renew pressure after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling weakened the Voting Rights Act. Riders from Georgia launched from the congressional dist
Montgomery, Ala.. felt familiar the moment bus passengers stepped off and onto Dexter Avenue—at least in shape and symbolism.. But for Keith Odom. it also felt like something harsher. because the people on his buses weren’t just commemorating a 1965 victory.. They were trying to keep that victory from slipping away.
Odom. 62. had come to Alabama from Aiken. South Carolina. joining several dozen activists who traveled on two buses to Montgomery after meeting in Atlanta.. He is Black. and he described the scene in front of him as he looked toward the Alabama Capitol and a stage positioned roughly where the Rev.. Martin Luther King Jr.. concluded the original march.. “The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” Odom said.. His voice trailed off as he took in the setting.
What followed wasn’t nostalgia.. Odom and others on Saturday’s “All Roads Lead to the South” rally said their purpose was to renew the fight after the U.S.. Supreme Court issued a ruling that, in their view, severely diminished the Voting Rights Act.. In the 1965 effort. Black Americans had peacefully demonstrated for voting rights and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal protection.. Odom was a toddler then.. Now, he said he wants more than a repeat of history’s older page.
The legal turning point Odom pointed to traces back to Congress sending the Voting Rights Act to Democratic President Lyndon B.. Johnson to sign, securing and expanding political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.. But Saturday’s organizing came after the Supreme Court struck down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana.. The justices concluded in a 6-3 ruling that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself discriminatory.. That decision, organizers said, pushed multiple states—including Alabama—to redraw U.S.. House districts in ways that make it harder for Black voters. who lean overwhelmingly Democratic. to elect lawmakers of their choice.. “I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom said.. “I want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”
The bus riders weren’t all starting their understanding from the same place. but the day’s timing stitched a single thread between generations: the 1965 voting rights march under federal protection led to passage of the Voting Rights Act. and Saturday’s rally began after a Supreme Court decision in 2026 that shifted how race can be considered in districting—an interruption riders linked directly to the long work of securing and expanding representation.
From Atlanta, the buses carried a range of ages and lived histories.. Justice Washington. a Kennesaw State University student named because her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. said her family’s excitement came before she ever reached Alabama.. “I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” Washington said.. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”
No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law.. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008.. Kobe Chernushin is 18, white, and just graduated high school in Atlanta’s northern suburbs.. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby. a 29-year-old executive for the organization. doing standups for the group’s followers on social media.. “I believe in the power of showing up,” Chernushin said.
Saturday’s route carried more than pageantry.. Some on the buses remembered John Lewis, whose congressional district is what the riders’ starting point in Georgia once represented.. Lewis was bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when he was 25 and died in 2020.. Still, riders celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is named for him.. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override the U.S.. Supreme Court. reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act. and outlaw the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald Trump has instigated.
Darrin Owens, 27, said he came for reasons he tied directly to Lewis’s era.. He has worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.. “I’m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he was a student,” Owens said.. “Political activism is personal,” he continued.. “Sometimes those lines are blurred. and as a Black person in America. a Black person living in a Southern state. I’m committed to action that stops what I consider to be un-American. this possibility that the person who represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.”
When Owens arrived, he said he saw no federal authorities on Montgomery’s streets.. He contrasted that with the image he carried from 1965, when a wounded, recovering Lewis had appeared during the second march.. This time, Owens said many of the Alabama troopers and local officers walking the area were Black.
The buses and sandwich lunches were arranged by Fair Fight Action. a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams. who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S.. history.. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.
Even the location carried reminders of competing American stories.. At different points. Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.. Phi Nguyen. the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees who is now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta. stood near the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955.. She said she also felt the weight of nearby reminders from earlier American history. including that she stood not far from where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending Confederate president.. “It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress. then there’s a huge backlash. and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were. ” Nguyen said.
Nguyen met friends as they walked—her sister Bee Nguyen. a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office. along with two women from Montgomery.. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old residents who have been friends since they were in a segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.. Ashford pointed at her dark skin when she spoke about what the word “integration” meant in her life.. “I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford said.. “It was never real integration, and it’s not like we can ever just blend in.”
Burton described herself as being “in the second wave” of Black students. saying. “It wasn’t easy. and we had to support each other.” She and the Nguyens swapped family histories and talked about older barriers—Burton and others remembered parents not being able to vote because of poll taxes. literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed.
But even as they held those memories. Burton said immigrants. descendants of enslaved persons and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths.. “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us. ” she said.. “They’ve never fully lived up to it.”
For Odom. the day carried a more personal conflict: the Supreme Court ruling. and the way it interpreted race-conscious election policy. returned him to anxieties about his own state’s political power.. He said the current U.S.. Supreme Court reinforced history by refusing to see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair representation. not simply the “technical right to vote.”
He recalled decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond—a segregationist Democratic governor who became a “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and U.S.. senator, later a Republican.. Odom said he fears South Carolina could lose U.S.. Rep.. Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, through redistricting.. “They want to take away that legacy when we’re still living with Strom’s?” Odom said.
He also voiced concern that the young people who joined Saturday are not a steady force, but outliers.. “I was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,” Odom said.. “She told me she supported me but didn’t want to do it or work for anybody” running for office.. “She wondered what any of them are going to do for her.”
Still, Odom said as he headed home he would keep talking. “I’m still going to tell her what I saw and what I heard.”
United States politics voting rights Voting Rights Act U.S. Supreme Court Alabama Montgomery redistricting John Lewis Martin Luther King Jr. Dexter Avenue Fair Fight Action Stacey Abrams Jim Clyburn