Ms. Rawls, a minister with the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, told the crowd that prayer was powerful, but that prayer alone was not enough. She echoed the words of the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer: “You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try and do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.”

Sirporia Sims, 31, was among those ready to pick up that mantle. “It has set us back quite a bit,” said Ms. Sims, who lives in Selma and whose work with Foot Soldiers Park and Education Center, a nonprofit based at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, focuses on encouraging civic engagement. “But we’re not going to let it take us all the way back.”

What the fight ahead looks like, and the strategy it will entail, is still being defined.

Randall Woodfin, the mayor of Birmingham, told the crowd assembled in Montgomery that many of those gathered were the “descendants of real foot soldiers” — young activists, some of them still children, who demonstrated in the 1960s while law enforcement officers sprayed them with high-pressure fire hoses and snarling police dogs lunged at them.

Draw on their fortitude, he told the crowd. Honor their experience by maintaining the fight, no matter how long it takes.

“We’re in this fight for the long game,” Mr. Woodfin said. “It requires you, in this moment, not to be silent. It requires you not to give up, to not only have hope but turn that into something tangible.”

“All roads lead to the South!” a man in the crowd called out, echoing the theme of the gathering.

“You heard that, brother,” Mr. Woodfin replied. “You’ve heard it before — the South’s got something to say.”

Bryant K. Oden contributed reporting from Montgomery, Ala.