(CS4.5) Walking in the Footsteps of History: Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday through Digital Documentation, Conflict Archaeology Visualization, and an HSR for the Edmund Pettus Bridge

Despite the vivid archival material around the events of Bloody Sunday and the subsequent marches, little interpretation addresses the physical context and experiential timeline of events. Visitors walk the Edmund Pettus Bridge, designated a National Historic Landmark in 2013, and often base their perception of the site on the historical drama Selma (2014): they pause on the apex of the bridge, thinking this is close to the line of conflict, as well as the point where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., other religious leaders, and marchers paused to kneel in prayer on Turnaround Tuesday, March 9, 1965. These perceptions were reinforced by the metered procession of the horse-drawn caisson carrying Representative Lewis’s casket for his final bridge crossing on July 26, 2020.

To address this gap, an interdisciplinary project team of architects, building scientists, and public historians from Auburn University and Georgia Institute of Technology has been working in Selma, AL for the last seven years to document the history of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Dallas County, and surrounding sites using historical documents, photos, and interviews with community members, along with technology (e.g., LiDAR, 360-degree photography, photogrammetry, and UAVs) to interpret and present that history in a new way. The team’s work has been supported by a 2019 National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant to develop a HSR (submitted March 2024), a 2021 National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks Grant to provide workshops for high school teachers, and several grants from the respective academic institutions. Throughout this work, the team engages with the community and local organizations. Although integral to the interpretive work of the National Park Service along the Selma to Montgomery Heritage Trail, the future of the Edmund Pettus Bridge is unclear: will necessary preservation work occur, will it be pedestrianized, how will a possible new bridge impact the historic viewshed, and how can the bridge be leveraged for sustainable heritage tourism in the region rather than a bucket list approach where visitors tour the site but do little to generate economic stimulus for the business and citizens in downtown Selma?

Leveraging new archival research and previously unreleased materials acquired through FOIA request, the HSR for the Edmund Pettus Bridge presents a full history of the bridge, addressing its white supremacist namesake and governmental moves that made the name possible, as well as previously unexplored details of its construction, the 1940 commissioning, the 1965 period of significance, and the rapid decline in the historic fabric in the area south of the bridge along US-80 where the Bloody Sunday conflict occurred. The digital documentation project makes the Bloody Sunday site accessible, and a new HAER set reveals construction discrepancies.