Inaugural speech in full | Frosty outlook ahead | First Lady passes fashion test | Order of the day | People of Selma | Things to come | No excuse for prejudice | A day out with Mum and Dad | A slave's journey | Musical inspiration | A brave new world | Elizabeth Alexander: poem | Derek Walcott: poem

The journey from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to the White House in Washington is 828 miles. It took two busloads of children from the celebrated civil rights town an exhausting but exhilarating 19 hours to cover that distance for the inauguration of America’s first black president. It took America 44 years.

The iconic iron-frame Edmund Pettus Bridge is the scene of the original “Bloody Sunday”, when blacks marching for their right to vote were beaten senseless by white “posse-men” and police on March 7, 1965. The clash proved a turning point in the civil rights movement that led within months to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing black suffrage throughout the segregated South.

The inauguration of Barack Obama has a special resonance to the people of Selma, who spilt their blood to win the right to vote for the leaders of their choice. Despite the hardship of the road, and the numbing poverty of many, dozens set out in buses to complete the civil rights march that they began almost half a century ago. Their mission was summed up by a banner that proclaimed “From the Bridge to the White House”.

“I was part of the 1963 march from Selma to Montgomery, so for me this is a dream come true. I heard Dr Martin Luther King’s remarks. Now I am part of living his dream,” said Carolyn Pickett, a primary school teacher who was one of those beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and who this week helped to escort 40 pupils from the historically black Knox Elementary School to Washington.

The Times accompanied the children, parents and teachers of Selma on this epic journey to their Promised Land. The bus ride revealed not just the progress that America has made but also the unintended costs of the civil rights era. Though its place in history is secure, Selma is struggling to stay alive as a town after white flight and job losses to foreign competition. Many of its shops are boarded up. The picturesque business district is increasingly a ghost town. Selma’s children may be proud of their forebears’ victories but they face a challenging future even in a nation led by a black president.

Selma was once the hub of Alabama’s cotton plantation region, known as the Black Belt for its fertile black soil. During the Civil War, it was a foundry producing arms and ammunition for the slave-owning Confederacy. Despite the emancipation of the slaves, whites reinstituted a harsh segregation.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference made Selma a focus of the civil rights movement because of its notoriously cruel white sheriff, Jim Clark, a proud segregationist who ran for election on the simple slogan “Never!”. Clark, who posed for pictures with an electric cattle prod in one hand and a billy club in the other, appointed local white men as sheriff’s deputies and lent his posse to drive civil rights protests out of town.

On February 18, 1965, a young black church deacon named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot as he tried to stop police beating his mother and 82-year-old grandfather after a march in nearby Marion. Jackson died eight days later, inspiring local black leaders to call for a protest march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery 54 miles (87km) away. The marchers set off across the bridge on March 7, walking two by two. But they were met on the other side by a force of club-wielding state troopers who fired teargas, and a posse of white men who ran amok.

“It was very frightening. I was not prepared for the violence of it,” Ms Pickett said. “Having grown up in Selma, a lot of people on the sidelines who were jeering and taunting were people my parents had done business with. The children of some of the jeerers and the taunters still have the same family businesses in Selma. There has been some sense of apology for the behaviour of their parents. They have not said ‘sorry’ but there is a sense of compassion and a sense of respect. I think they came to the conclusion that skin colour does not determine character.”

Though no one died, the violence caused outrage across America and brought an immediate influx of civil rights supporters. Two days later Dr King led a march that stopped with a prayer vigil at the bridge. Later that day a white Unitarian Universalist minister named James Reeb, who had come from Boston to show his support, was beaten to death by segregationists outside a favoured Ku Klux Klan bar. His death provoked further outcry, prompting Congress to act. About 3,200 marchers finally began the five-day trek to Montgomery on March 21. On March 25 a throng of 25,000 arrived.

“We are the ones who really, really got it all started in the 1960s with the right to vote,” Juanita Tripp, who accompanied her granddaughter, Jada, on the bus trip to the inauguration, said. “I remember when I would go every day to the courthouse to try to get the right to vote. We would line up and they would call just two people. If you stood against the wall, they would tell you ‘N-word! Stand up!’. So cruel. I went for two weeks before I finally got to register to vote.

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