Start from 19 curated places around Selma, AL, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Tally-Ho Restaurant
The one place in Selma where people go for a proper dinner out, operating since the early 1940s in a log cabin that started as a private hunting lodge. The room itself, with its low doorways, uneven floors, and original timber walls, is half the reason to go; the menu leans on seafood and steaks with occasional European inflections.
Lannie's Bar-B-Q Spot
A Selma institution on Minter Avenue that has been smoking pork and feeding a cross-section of the city for decades, and was a documented gathering place during the civil rights movement. The pulled pork sandwich on plain white bread with the house sauce is the order, though the catfish and fried okra draw their own loyalists.
Trails & outdoors
Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail
The 54-mile route of the 1965 Voting Rights March, established by Congress in 1996. Most visitors walk or drive the first segment from the Edmund Pettus Bridge west along U.S. Highway 80, the same road the marchers covered over three days. The full route includes the Lowndes County Interpretive Center at the midpoint.
Old Cahawba Archaeological Park
Alabama's first state capital, abandoned in the 1820s and now an 11.6-mile trail network through a site where the ruins of antebellum streets, house foundations, and cemeteries emerge from Spanish moss and bottomland forest. Three trails of varying lengths cross the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama rivers, with loaner bicycles available for flat sections.
Things to do
National Voting Rights Museum and Institute
Founded by foot soldiers of the civil rights movement and run at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, this small museum holds artifacts, photographs, and personal testimonies that the larger NPS center does not have. A wall of handprints from people who marched gives it a physical quality that official exhibits rarely achieve.
Old Depot Museum
The 1890 Romanesque Revival L&N Railroad depot at the foot of Water Avenue, now an interpretive history museum covering Dallas County from prehistoric indigenous settlement through the Civil War and into the civil rights era. The collection is broad, locally specific, and personally curated by staff who bring individual artifacts to life.
Landmarks & sights
Edmund Pettus Bridge
The steel arch bridge where 600 civil rights marchers were beaten back by law enforcement on March 7, 1965, an event that accelerated the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Walking across it yourself, up the gentle incline that hides what's on the other side until you crest the top, is a quiet and powerful way to understand the geography of that day.
Selma Interpretive Center
The National Park Service's welcome center at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, housed in an 1880s building on Broad Street. Interactive exhibits span two floors with archival news footage, photographs, and interviews from marchers and the law enforcement officials who confronted them.