The following article, by Richard M. Sommer — Dean and Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Daniels Faculty — and Glenn Forley, was originally published in CriticalProductive Journal, V1.1 Theoretic Action, Autumn 2011.

The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own "scorched earth" policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground- nonviolently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you, WAKE UP AMERICA!
— John L. Lewis, deleted portion of his speech at the March on Washington, D.C. (1963)

Beauty belongs to all the people.
— President Lyndon Johnson at the signing of the Highway Beautification Act (1965)

The 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Alabama voting rights march along highway U.S. 80 represents a critical moment in the history of American democracy, where the tension between maintaining civic order in the country's most public of spaces, and exercising a basic act of citizenship fell into crisis. Despite all that has been said and written about the march from Selma to Montgomery, important aspects of the built infrastructure central to this historic event have not been well understood. Our purpose here will be to emphasize the local, and moreover, spatial politics at work in the intersection between the personal act of walking, its more conscious performance in the collective protest march, and the American highway. The collective walk along U.S. 80, as a democratic activity, highlights contradictions between the practices of the 1960s civil rights and highway beautification movements, and opens questions about the relationship between the aesthetic and political ambitions of this period. That is, if the federal solution to the commercial "blight" of the 1960s infrastructural landscape lay in applying aesthetic blandishments of nature to the country's largest network of public space (the interstate highways), was there an analogous change in aesthetic to the spaces in which the ugliness of racial segregation and the suppression of constitutional rights took place?

The protest walk along a highway is a particular kind of civil as well as civic disobedience in which peaceful protest intervenes in what is commonly held as uncontested space. In an urban context, civil disobedience is inherent in the common spaces of the city. The tacit understanding of the street is that it harbors the potential for collective protest.' Alternatively, the highway becomes a staging ground for protest only by imposition. Given the social compact of a highway — the acceptance of a minimum of limits (i.e., speed, alcohol consumption) in return for maximum efficiency — the collective protest walk is a civic intrusion into a mono-functional space that intensifies the more familiar and historically sanctioned act of civil disobedience.2 And yet, in the context of the Jim Crow South, an additional layer of limits consisting of implied social practices and unstated cultural codes existed for its African-American population that operated on a state and, moreover, a local level, effectively compromising the American myth of the highway as an unfettered space. The collective transgression of the highway by southern blacks, in other words, implicated an entire spatial, and in turn social structure.

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