Marie Foster

Marie Foster, a dental technician whose quiet but effective efforts to win voting rights for blacks made her a national symbol when she was beaten by police in the Selma, Ala., voting rights march in 1965, died Sept. 6 in Selma. She was 85.

Mrs. Foster was one of the original eight members of the Dallas County Voters League, a group that came to be called the Courageous Eight and worked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders to make Selma the center of a national crusade. She later was called " the mother of the voting rights movement " by its local organizers.

She tried eight times to register to vote before succeeding; she coached blacks on how to pass the deliberately bewildering voter registration tests.

She was clubbed at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge when state troopers stopped the first march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7. Two days later, she tried to hobble forward in another march, one that was stopped peacefully.

On March 11, when President Lyndon B. Johnson went on national television to announce that he would send Congress a strong voting rights bill, it was in Mrs. Foster ' s living room that King watched and wept at the news.

When the march was permitted to begin March 21, two weeks later, Mrs. Foster walked 50 miles in five days with injured knees.

In his book on the civil rights movement, " The Children " (Random House, 1998), David Halberstam called Mrs. Foster " one of the heroes of the Selma group. "

Marie Priscilla Martin was born Oct. 24, 1917, in rural Wilcox County, near Alberta, Ala. Her mother wanted her children to be educated, but her father resisted moving to town, Mrs. Foster said in a statement prepared for the Web site of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, which she helped found. Her mother then sneaked away and took her children to Selma.

Mrs. Foster dropped out of high school to marry and had three young children when her husband died. After working for years, she returned to high school and graduated after her daughter, Rose. She then went to junior college, became a dental hygienist and went to work for her brother, Dr. Sullivan Jackson.

She became involved in the growing voting rights movement because of anger over racial discrimination. Halberstam suggested that being employed by her brother protected her from economic pressure from the white establishment.

Working with the Dallas County Voters League, she went door to door with leaflets and asked all ministers in town to announce the registration effort from their pulpits.

Things went slowly at first. Taylor Branch, in his book " Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 " (Simon & Schuster, 1998), said Mrs. Foster ' s first class to teach literacy for the voting test drew one student, a man in his 70s.

In 1964, she was named in an injunction against voter registration leaders along with John Lewis, the civil rights leader who is now a Georgia congressman, Branch wrote. The Ku Klux Klan threatened her life several times.

In 1985, Mrs. Foster told about her experience at the bridge in an interview with United Press International.

" It was a trooper who hit me, " she said, adding that it happened just as she crossed the bridge near the head of the column of about 525 demonstrators. " I lay on the pavement with my eyes closed. I didn ' t move. I stood my ground. "

Mrs. Foster is survived by her son, James Foster of Indianapolis; daughter, Rose Davis of Salt Lake City; brothers, Dr. Sullivan Jackson and Thomas Martin, both of Selma; and three grandchildren.