A new short documentary tells the story of two teenage sisters who marched from Selma to Montgomery. Their fight for voting rights still resonates today.
Aug. 6, 2026, marks the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the VRA sought to end Jim Crow-era voter disenfranchisement. Particularly in Southern states, voting officials routinely required Black voters to jump through hoops such as “literacy tests” or arbitrary rules such as having to name every county in the state before voting. Even if a Black voter managed to make it this far, election administrators sometimes intentionally sent them to the wrong location to vote, ensuring their vote never actually got counted.
The Voting Rights Act made it illegal for states to discriminate against voters by race, color or language-minority status, thereby reaffirming all U.S. citizens’ constitutional right to vote. The VRA also introduced additional changes to make voting more widely accessible, such as ballots in languages other than English and protections for blind, disabled and illiterate voters.
However, the VRA only became law after decades of struggle and widespread civil rights protests, including the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in March 1965. Protesters, many of whom were young students, faced violent attacks from law enforcement, from tear gas to imprisonment, as they fought for their right to vote.
Sisters Take Action
Sisters Alice and Denise Thomas were only 16 and 14 when they joined the Selma to Montgomery marches and other protests in their home state of Alabama before the VRA became law.
In the new short documentary Selma Sisters March On, the Thomas sisters describe in their own words the fateful events of 1965 as they experienced them as high school-aged civil-rights activists.
The 27-minute film combines the interviews with archived footage on the protests and pictures from the Thomases’ lives growing up in Alabama in the deeply segregated Jim Crow 1960s.
When the 15th Amendment first passed in 1872, more than 140,000 Black men in Alabama registered to vote. However, Southern states immediately started passing Jim Crow laws.
Only 10 years later, fewer than 4,000 Black men in Alabama were registered to vote—a number that only barely improved well into the 20th century.
The Thomases’ interest in voting rights started with their parents: Their father had only an eighth grade education, but becoming a registered voter was crucially important to him. Alice and Denise watched their parents try to vote but be turned away by erratic, discriminatory policies at the ballot box.
“Anybody of color [who] tried to register, they were degraded. People had different tests,” Alice remembers in her interview in the film. “Those were the things our parents were facing, and they came back disappointed, and that was a hard thing to watch them be humiliated.”
Even though they were too young to vote, Alice and Denise faced their forms of own racial discrimination, such as having to sit in the back of their local bus even when there were no white people in the seats in front of them.
When John Lewis came to Selma with SNCC, or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Alice and Denise joined SNCC’s efforts to build efforts for the Voting Rights Act. At school, they convinced their fellow students to join marches and protests—with the help of a sympathetic principal who announced that any students who wanted to leave school for the day to march were allowed to do so. Protesting wasn’t without its risks, however, even for students so young. “They’d take you to the local jailhouse, keep you for a few hours, and let you go. Every time we went out, every time they locked us up. We went to jail every day,” Denise remembers, laughing. She also recalls more young girls participating than boys: “We were trained not to fight back. If [police] hit you, you have to endure, and a lot of boys could not take that. They wanted to fight.”
One time, the Thomas sisters and dozens of other students were taken to a prison camp about 10 miles outside of Selma. For four days, “nobody knew where we were,” Denise says, until John Lewis and other civil-rights activists came to bail them out.
But this harrowing experience wasn’t enough to stop Denise and Alice from advocating for voting rights. In March 1965, they participated in multiple of the Selma to Montgomery marches with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., leading to Alice blacking out from tear gas during the police attack on the March 7, 1965, march that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Alice and Denise, still just teenagers at the time, were two of the 300 people to complete the entire 54-mile journey.
Finally, after years of bravery and tenacity from Black Southern voting-rights activists, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in August 1965. Within a year, half of the Black people in Alabama were registered to vote.
“When they heard about it in [our] neighborhood, there was a man, lived next door,” Alice remembers. “He had a pickup truck, and he put chairs on the back of the pickup truck and picked up everybody who did not have a way to get downtown to vote.”
Return to Voting-Rights Activism
For nearly 50 years after its passing, the Voting Rights Act was enshrined in U.S. law. But now, on its 61st anniversary, advocates are forced to reckon with a Supreme Court determined to steadily dismantle the VRA. And, sadly, Selma Sisters March On’s story about Alice and Denise fighting for voting rights in the 60s could not be more timely now in 2026.
Less than 15 years ago in 2013, the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Shelby County v. Holder struck down Section 5 of the VRA, which required jurisdictions with a history of voter discrimination to submit any proposed changes to their voting procedures to the U.S. Department of Justice in order to ensure the change would not hurt traditionally marginalized voters.
Then, just four months ago, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais dismantled the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2, which prohibited voting rules or procedures that discriminate against voters based on race. Section 2 included race-based gerrymandering, so SCOTUS’ ruling in Louisiana v. Callais effectively gives a green light to gerrymandering voting districts based solely on race, which has been illegal for all 60+ years of the VRA’s history.
After the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, Alice and Denise more or less went back to their regular lives. They finished high school, started careers and went nearly 50 years hardly speaking about the momentous social justice movement they were part of as teenagers.
But, after marching 54 miles in the 1960s for voting rights, watching the Supreme Court erode the VRA before their very eyes has convinced both sisters to return to activism, picking up where they left off when they were in high school. “We’re going backwards,” Denise says. Now, Denise and Alice travel the country sharing their story and speaking to students and young people to urge them to fight for the right to vote, no matter what it takes.
“You need to go to the polls,” Denise tells a room full of high schoolers in one clip. “Yes, there are crooked politicians out there. There are quite a few. If you don’t vote, you’re not going to get that person out… Because America has always understood the power of the ballot. Who should be allowed to vote? Well, if we let poor folks vote, then they will dilute the power of the rich.”
Selma Sisters March On is free to watch and available online.
