Twenty-five eighth graders from Waring School in Beverly, Massachusetts, walked up Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery towards the Alabama State Capitol building. It was late March, and the camellias that surrounded the building’s grand marble staircase were in full bloom.

Fifty-four years earlier, almost to the day, 25,000 protestors marched up that same avenue and gathered near the same steps. For five days and four nights, the civil rights advocates had marched 54 miles along U.S. Highway 80 from Selma to the Statehouse.