Lesson plan

Lesson Plan: How Geography Drove M.L.K.’s Fight for a Ferry in Alabama

Grades 6-12

Weeks before Selma’s Bloody Sunday in 1965, when Alabama state troopers attacked peaceful voting-rights marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Gee’s Bend, Ala., to urge Black residents to register and vote. The episode became part of a decades-long struggle over ferry service across the Alabama River, illustrating how geography, public infrastructure and structural barriers can shape access to the ballot.