This weekend, as President Obama and members of Congress travel to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a new generation of activists is working to strip the name of Edmund Pettus — a former state legislator who doubled as a top KKK official — from the city's most famous civil rights landmark.

Students Unite, an organization made mostly of college and graduate students focused on social justice issues in Selma, has collected more than 158,000 signatures on a Change.org petition calling on Alabama leaders to rename the bridge, where police viciously beat demonstrators marching for voting rights on March 7, 1965.

But because the bridge is both part of a federal highway and a National Historic landmark —not to mention a source of sentimentality for some in Alabama — erasing the avowed racist's name from it won't be as simple as some think.

Pettus' racism was no secret

"Everyone knows the bridge is famous for the march and Bloody Sunday, so the idea that the name of the place where all of this happened represents something so contrary to all of that really bothers us," said Students Unite's executive director, 25-year-old John Gainey.

The discrepancy is striking, but the life of the bridge's namesake has never been a secret. The Washington Post reported that when the bridge was constructed 75 years ago, Pettus' legacy was well known, and the span of the highway was named "for a man revered locally as a tenacious Southern leader."

It's also right there on the Federal Highway Administration's website in its description of the structure, which was built in 1940 and carries traffic across the Alabama River: "It had been named after a Civil War General and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan who served in the United States Senate from 1897 until his death in 1907. He was the last Confederate General to serve in the Senate."

Why people care now

According to Gainey, there was an effort to remove Pettus' name from the bridge five years ago, but it didn't take. Now, he says, "there is enough momentum to actually get it done."

That's because, while the events of Bloody Sunday are commemorated every year, this year, the 50th anniversary, is different. With the release of Ava DuVernay's Oscar-nominated film, Selma, which depicted Martin Luther King's marches from Montgomery to Selma, the city's role in the civil rights movement has been in the national spotlight.

Gainey thinks the heightened attention to the city's civil rights legacy as a result of the film — including the scene highlighting when marchers were beaten by police as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge — has inspired renewed interest in honoring the actions of the participants.

DuVernay hasn't called for the bridge's name to be changed, but in a 60 Minutes interview last February, she drew attention to the contrast between the bridge's contemporary symbolism and the man whose name it bears: "I took great pleasure in directing scenes on this bridge. I imagine him [Pettus] turning over in his grave a little bit, thinking ‘where did it all go wrong?! This was not supposed to happen!'"

But the students pushing for a change don't find it amusing. "The name Edmund Pettus is far from what the city of Selma should honor," their petition says. "Let's change the image of the bridge from hatred and rename it to memorialize hope and progress."

What it will take to change the name

It's not unusual for schools, buildings, and parks to be stripped of names that have racist connotations. For example, a 2013 Change.org petition successfully pushed to strip the name of a KKK leader from a Florida high school.

But the fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge is both a portion of a federal highway (US 80) and a National Historic Landmark makes things especially complicated.

According to the Federal Highway Administration, states retain power over naming and renaming any highways under their jurisdiction, either through the introduction of legislation or an action by the State department of transportation. (In February 2008, a state resolution renamed a portion of Alabama 62 the "Curly Putnam Jr. Highway," in honor of a songwriter.)

Tony W. Harris, the Alabama Department of Transportation's media and community relations bureau chief said that when the state legislature passes a resolution regarding an honorary naming of a road or bridge, that resolution must be ratified by the transportation director in order to be made official. He suggested the Department of Interior or National Park Service would possibly have to be involved in changing the name of the bridge's National Historic Landmark designation.

The Change.org petition calls on "Alabama, the city of Selma, and the National Park Service to" to remove Pettus' name from the bridge. Gainey said the specific process for renaming, was "somewhat murky" to organizers, but they planned to approach Alabama governor Robert J. Bentley with the results of the petition.

This won't be easy

Gainey said that Students Unite would prefer not to see the bridge renamed after another individual. The organizers would instead want to "open it up to people in the Selma community" — who, the petition points out, are 80 percent African American. The ideal replacement, he said, would "show respect for the civil rights movement of 50 years ago and what still needs to happen in the community today."

But according to a report by Al.com, not everyone agrees - in fact, many Selma residents oppose the change. One white resident told the publication, "If we really want to make a change in our city, I'm not sure that changing the name of the bridge is going to help. I think it's going to be more divisive than unifying."

There's unlikely to be agreement about this, even among Alabama's leadership. Politico reported that, on a national level, no members of the House Republican leadership plan to attend this weekend's commemorative events, a fact that highlights how partisan issues related to the commemoration of civil rights history are.

Harris (of the Alabama DOT) suggested that he personally might not support an effort to replace Pettus' name. "The bridge's name is linked to history because of what happened at the bridge in 1965, and the monumental change that followed," he said in an email to Vox. "And it's the name 'Edmund Pettus Bridge' that has been recorded as a National Historic Landmark."