By Blake Deshazo

The Selma Times-Journal

The National Park Service is launching a lecture series in January that will teach people about the march from Selma to Montgomery. The series will feature a lecture each month that covers a different topic about the march.

“The idea around it is to get people talking to have some type of dialogue about what happened, so they can bring it to the present,” said Patricia Butts who works with the NPS. “It was chosen to introduce audiences to the stories of the Selma to Montgomery march that eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

The first lecture, “Martyrs of the March,” will discuss the contributions made by Jimmie Lee Jackson, the Rev. James Reeb, Viola Gregg Luizzo and seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels during the Civil Rights Movement.

“The lecture will be about who they were, why they chose to get involved, and then their contributions and how it influenced the course of the movement,” Butts said. “There were several martyrs, but they had the ultimate sacrifice of losing their lives in the struggle for civil rights, and these four people are chosen because they are associated with the Selma to Montgomery march.”

“Martyrs of the March” will be held Tuesday, Jan. 13 at 5:30 p.m. at the Civil Rights Museum in Montgomery. It will begin a yearlong program to teach people more about the march and how it impacted the movement.

“It starts in January, and then we’ll have one in February that will highlight children of the movement,” Butts said. “In March, we are having our walking classroom, and then we will pick (the series) back up in April.”

Butts said she hopes the lecture will provide opportunities for people to learn about the march that don’t get to experience the Jubilee.

“We don’t want the 50th anniversary just to be capsulated in one week,” Butts said. “We want to have people who might not get to come here for that historic event to be able to offer some type of education to the public in the coming weeks after the anniversary has taken place.”

Butts said the NPS wants the series to reach out to young people who may not know about the march and how it changed history.

“We want to introduce another audience to the 50th anniversary,” Butts said. “We want to make it relevant so people can understand what took place and how they can be peaceful change agents for now and the future.”