Selma, wing. – Charles Mauldin was close to the front of a line of vote rights protesters who walked in pairs through the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965.
Protesters protested by the refusal of white officials to allow black alabamians to register to vote, as well as the murder days before Jimmie Lee JacksonA minister and an organizer of voting rights who was fired by a state soldier in near Marion.
In the vertex of the span on the Alabama River, they saw what awaited them: a line of state soldiers, deputies and men on horseback. They went ahead. After they approached, the police gave a two -minute warning to disperse and then unleashed violence.
“In approximately a minute or middle, they took their clubs from Billy, holding it at both ends, began to push us back to the back, and then began to overcome men, women and children, and tearful men, women and children and men, women and children brutally,” said Mauldin, who was 17 years old at the time.
Selma on Sunday marked the 60th anniversary of the clash that was known as Bloody Sunday. The attack shocked the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Law of the United States of 1965. The annual commemoration pays tribute to those who fought to ensure vote rights for black Americans and brought calls to return to the struggle for equality.
For those gathered in Selma, the celebration occurs in the midst of concerns about New voting restrictions And the Trump administration effort to redo the federal agencies that, they said, helped make the United States a democracy for all
Speaking in the pulpit of the historic Baptist Church of the Tabernacle of the city, the leader of the minority of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, said what happened in Selma changed the nation. He said that the 60th anniversary arrives at a time when there are “problems in everything” and some “want to bleach our history.” But he said that, as the protesters of the Bloody Sunday, they must move on.
“At this time, facing problems on each side, we have to move on,” Jeffries told the crowd that included Reverend Jesse Jackson, several members of Congress and others gathered for commemoration.
The members of the Congress joined the bloody Sunday protesters to direct a march of several thousand people throughout the Edmund Pettus bridge. They stopped to pray at the site where protesters were beaten in 1965.
“We gathered here on the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday when our country is in chaos,” said American representative Terri Sewell of Alabama.
Sewell, a Selma native, pointed out the number of voting restrictions introduced since the United States Supreme Court effectively abolished a key part of the Voting Rights Law that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to eliminate new voting laws with the Department of Justice. Other speakers noticed the impulse of the Trump administration to end the efforts of diversity, equity and inclusion and a reversal of executive orders of equal opportunities that have been in the books since the 1960s.
In 1965, Sunday’s bloody protesters led by John Lewis And I mean Williams entered couples through the Selma bridge that went to Montgomery.
“We had saturated our nerves to a point where we were so determined that we were willing to face. It had happened to be brave. We were determined, and we were outraged, ”Mauldin recalled.
He said that the “country was not a democracy for blacks” to voting rights. “And we are still constantly fighting to make that a more concrete reality for ourselves.”
Kirk Carrington was only 13 years old on bloody Sunday and was persecuted by the city for a man on a horse that wielded a stick. “When we started marching, we didn’t know the impact we would have on the United States,” he said.
Dr. Verdell Lett Dawson, who grew up in Selma, remembers a time when he was expected to look down if he went to a white person on the street to avoid making visual contact.
Dawson and Mauldin said they are concerned about the possible dismantling of the Department of Education and other changes to federal agencies.
The support of the federal government “is how blacks have been able to obtain justice, to obtain a certain appearance of equality, because from the left to the rights of the states, it will be the white majority that will govern,” Dawson said.
“That is a tragedy of 60 years later: what we are seeing now is a return to the 1950s,” Dawson said.
