Bogalusa to Baton Rouge March

They left Bogalusa on August 10, 1967, twenty-five of them. A. Z. Young, Robert Hicks and Gayle Jenkins led, and Hicks's daughter remembers the point as proving that Black people could travel and protest on a public road without being attacked. The marchers had asked for federal protection from violence and slurs, and it came. By the time they reached Baton Rouge about ten days later there were roughly 600, and more than 2,200 National Guardsmen and police surrounded them. Distances are given as 105 or 106 miles.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — 0.2 mi
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 4.8 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• The C.O.R.E. March — steps away
• Garner v. Louisiana — steps away
• Pioneers of the Bus Boycott — steps away
• Alvin Batiste — steps away