George Washington Carver Neighborhood

George Washington Carver Neighborhood. . The George Washington Carver neighborhood served as base camp for the votings rights movement during the tumultuous weeks of March 1965. These blocks of brick two-story homes, the city's first and largest federal housing project for blacks, built in 1951, were headquarters to many civil rights workers. Residents offered up spare rooms and cooked extra meals for strangers from out of town, many of them white, who joined the cause. Martin Luther King, Jr. Street was still unpaved Sylvan Street then. Expectant marchers stood here day after day in the dust and mud awaiting instructions from the movement's leaders., These were salt, of, the, earth people, school teachers, beauticians, undertakers, housewives, men, women and children from every walk of black life in Selma...nameless individuals to outsiders, faceless people to all but those of us who were there. Congressman John Lewis, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Residents of the George Washington Carver neighborhood talking to Alabama State trooper., In March 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a large rally of supporters at the George Washington Carver Project in Selma.