Thank you. [View all]

[sheshe2]

Thank you. To all the candidates that made their way to Selma to march with respect for the 55th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the knowledge that civil rights are in fact a human right and that black lives matter.

Thank you Joe, Elizabeth, Pete, Amy and Mike.

Rep John Lewis: "Vote Like You Have Never Voted Before."

John Lewis is undergoing cancer treatments, he made it there today. It wouldn't have been the same without him. He was beaten within an inch of his life that day and has never stopped fighting.

………….

Remembering Selma’s “Bloody Sunday”

On the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” look back at the assault on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, that led to the Voting Rights Act.

Nearly a century after the Confederacy’s guns fell silent, the racial legacies of slavery and Reconstruction continued to reverberate loudly throughout Alabama in 1965. Even the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 months earlier had done little in some parts of the state to ensure African Americans of the basic right to vote. Perhaps no place was Jim Crow’s grip tighter than in Dallas County, where African Americans made up more than half of the population, yet accounted for just 2 percent of registered voters.


snip

Outrage at “Bloody Sunday” swept the country. Sympathizers staged sit-ins, traffic blockades and demonstrations in solidarity with the voting rights marchers. Some even traveled to Selma where two days later King attempted another march but, to the dismay of some demonstrators, turned back when troopers again blocked the highway at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Finally, after a federal court order permitted the protest, the voting rights marchers left Selma on March 21 under the protection of federalized National Guard troops. Four days later, they reached Montgomery with the crowd growing to 25,000 by the time they reached the capitol steps.

The events in Selma galvanized public opinion and mobilized Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965. Today, the bridge that served as the backdrop to “Bloody Sunday” still bears the name of a white supremacist, but now it is a symbolic civil rights landmark.


https://www.history.com/news/selmas-bloody-sunday-50-years-ago