On Wednesday, the Alabama Senate passed a resolution to rename the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The bridge’s current name pays homage to a Confederate general in the Civil War who later became a Ku Klux Klan leader. The bridge is a powerful symbol in American civil rights history: In 1965, it was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when voting rights activists were assaulted and killed on their march to Montgomery.

One of the forces driving the legislation is Students UNITE. The group formed in January in Selma with a core group of 40 students; it now has chapters at colleges in 10 states around the country, including Wisconsin and Florida. The group’s work in Selma, however, began several years earlier, according to John Gainey, the group’s 25-year-old executive director.

The group includes college students, graduate students, and a handful of high school students. Gainey came to Selma from Wisconsin after college in 2012 to teach science to middle and high school students. Through his teaching, he met young people in the community, including many Selma natives, who were committed to making positive change—through mentoring and after-school programs, theater groups, civil rights immersion tours, and other grassroots organizing efforts. The group is deeply informed by the activism of John Lewis, who marched on Bloody Sunday with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

United by a desire to uplift the youths of a city that struggles with a child poverty rate of nearly 60 percent and lingering segregation—there is still a country club that has no black members—the students were also inspired by Selma’s legacy of civil rights activism. “Selma itself is a constant source of inspiration,” Gainey told TakePart. “It has a very empowering spirit that we all love.” That spirit drives the multifaceted youth development work that Students UNITE engages in. Its biggest project is fund-raising to renovate a huge old abandoned building two blocks from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where it hopes to bring together its many programs under one roof.

Renaming the bridge is more of a symbolic side project than the driving force of the group’s youth development efforts. But it has gained national attention since the launch of the campaign to call it the Journey to Freedom Bridge.

At an organizing meeting in February, a member brought up that the bridge was named after Pettus, whose KKK legacy was a reminder of “racial terrorism and violent segregation,” Gainey said. The group then learned that the bridge was named in 1940 by a group of white legislators. That reaffirmed its desire to change the name to better reflect Selma’s population, which is 80 percent black. The group started by creating an online petition, which within a month gained more than 180,000 signatures. “Social media has been a huge weapon and has been so useful in helping us push out the petition and rallying young people around the idea,” Gainey said.

After trying to work with the National Parks Association and the local transportation department to change the name, the group took its viral petition to the office of Hank Sanders, a Democratic state senator who represents Selma. Sanders met with the students and over the course of several discussions agreed to write and sponsor the resolution that the Alabama Senate passed this week.

“There was a thought that every time you lift the name, you also lift the name of the KKK grand dragon,” Sanders told The Associated Press. “That bridge became a symbol of the struggle for freedom.”

When Gainey learned on Wednesday that the resolution had passed the senate, he was excited, but he was immediately reminded of the strong Confederate sentiment that persists in opposition to Student UNITE’s cause. Neo-Confederate groups took to Facebook to air their grievances, calling to mind the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march three months earlier, when Gainey and his cohort changed their path to avoid a possible confrontation with the same groups.

It is clear to Gainey that the bill will not be scheduled for a vote in the house in the next few weeks, but the group intends to renew its campaign during the next legislative session. In the meantime, its members will continue to work with youths in Selma and expand its presence through membership at college campuses around the country.

“The bridge is just a symbol, but it would mean a lot to see that symbol removed,” Gainey said. “It has really given the young people a way to focus their voice and has shown that this is a generation that can rally around something they care about.”