This Saturday, March 7, is the 50th anniversary of the first Selma to Montgomery March and Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama:
Six hundred marchers assembled in Selma on Sunday, March 7, and, led by John Lewis and other SNCC and SCLC activists, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery. Just short of the bridge, they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, the officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent protesters with billy clubs and ultimately hospitalizing over fifty people.
State troopers swing billy clubs to break up a civil rights voting march in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965. John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (in the foreground), is being beaten by state troopers (Photo: James “Spider” Martin Photographic Archive/Briscoe Center, University of Texas at Austin)
“Bloody Sunday” was televised around the world. Martin Luther King called for civil rights supporters to come to Selma for a second march. When members of Congress pressured him to restrain the march until a court could rule on whether the protesters deserved federal protection, King found himself torn between their requests for patience and demands of the movement activists pouring into Selma. King, still conflicted, led the second protest on March 9 but turned it around at the same bridge.
On March 21, the final successful march began with federal protection.
On August 6, 1965, the federal Voting Rights Act was passed, completing the process that King had hoped for.
At the time a special assistant to president Lyndon Johnson, PBS’s Bill Moyers reflects on Selma 50 years later in this essay, 50 Years After Bloody Sunday in Selma, Everything and Nothing Has Changed (excerpts):
Congress can’t agree on much these days, but on February 11, the House unanimously passed a resolution awarding the Congressional Gold Medal — the body’s highest honor — to the foot soldiers of the 1965 voting-rights movement in Selma, Alabama.
The resolution was sponsored by Representative Terri Sewell, Alabama’s first black congresswoman, who grew up in Selma. Sewell was born on January 1, 1965, a day before Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma to kick off the demonstrations that would result in passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) eight months later. On February 15, 2015, Sewell returned to Selma, which she now represents, to honor the “unsung heroes” of the voting-rights movement at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, the red brick headquarters for Selma’s civil-rights activists in 1965, taking the pulpit where King once preached.
The film Selma has brought renewed attention to the dramatic protests of 1965. Tens of thousands of people, including President Obama, will converge on the city on March 7, the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when 600 marchers, including John Lewis, now a Congressman, were brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers.
At Brown Chapel, Sewell stressed the disturbing parallels between the fight for voting rights then and now. She cited the Supreme Court’s gutting of the VRA in 2013 and the spread of voter-ID laws that disproportionately burden minority voters. “The assaults of the past are here again,” she said. “Old battles have become new again.” Sewell’s mother, Nancy, Selma’s first black city councilwoman, read the names of the two dozen foot soldiers as Sewell presented each of them with a gold certificate. The loudest applause greeted 85-year-old Frederick Douglas Reese, who strode down the aisle in a sharp pinstripe suit. “My principal!” Sewell called him.
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On July 27, 2006, President George W. Bush signed legislation reauthorizing the VRA for another 25 years. He invited Selma Mayor James Perkins to the Rose Garden signing ceremony and thanked him in his speech. Seven years later, the Supreme Court struck down the most important part of the VRA, the requirement that states with the worst histories of voting discrimination, like Alabama, approve voting changes with the federal government. Announcing the decision from the bench, Chief Justice John Roberts cited the election of a black mayor in Selma as a reason why the VRA’s powerful federal oversight was no longer needed.
Perkins finds that deeply ironic. “The gutting of the act was synonymous with gutting the people who worked so hard to achieve the act in the first place,” Perkins says, thinking of his mentor, Reese. “I took it personally. When you are part of the change, and you see those changes reversed and know they were for the better, it really hurts.” Selma was not just the birthplace of the VRA; the law protected minority voters from discriminatory election schemes on more than 10 different occasions from the 1970s to the ’90s.
Legislation to strengthen the VRA in the wake of the Court’s decision has gone nowhere in Congress. The House unanimously approved Sewell’s bill honoring the foot soldiers of Selma, but only eleven Republicans have sponsored the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 in the House, and none in the Senate.
It remains to be seen whether Congress can move from symbolism to substance on civil rights. Sewell and Lewis recently screened Selma at the Capitol with Republican lawmakers and plan to welcome a large bipartisan delegation to Alabama for the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
“My hope is that the bipartisan efforts we’ve made will move people to recommit themselves to restore the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act,” Sewell says. “Gold medals are great — I think it’s long overdue and much deserved that the foot soldiers are going to finally get their place in history, but the biggest tribute that we can give to those foot soldiers is fully restoring the Voting Rights Act.”
Selma transformed America. It’s time for America to repay that debt.