The white college student supported Black voters in segregated Alabama, and began documenting the front lines of the voting rights fight, which locals continue to disregard. For all the stacks of material that 79-year-old Maria Gitin has in her archives, there are just a couple grainy photos from the summer of 1965—right before her sophomore year at San Francisco State—which she spent in Wilcox County, Alabama, sleeping on church pews, ducking gunfire, getting arrested, and helping Black residents exercise their long-standing 15th Amendment right to vote. One Monday in March, the 19-year-old turned on the news to footage of violent attacks against peaceful demonstrators on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. The camera cut to Dr. Martin King Jr. at the pulpit, asking Americans to stand up for what was right, good, and true. A young white woman who was “very idealistic” in believing a better world was possible, she felt personally called to the cause by King’s speeches and his “liberation theology of love and compassion.” She wrangled a signed legal waiver from her furious parents, raised the money for her transportation to a training in Atlanta, and joined hundreds of other college stude
