Selma, wing. – Charles Mauldin was close to the front of a line of protesters of the voting rights that walked in pairs through the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965.
The 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 Jackson, a minister and organizer of voting rights that 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. After they approached, the police gave a warning to disperse and then unleash 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 surprised La Nación and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Law of the United States of 1965. The annual commemoration paid tribute to those who fought to ensure vote rights for black Americans and brought calls to reference to the struggle for equality.
For soldiers of the feet of the movement, the celebration occurs in the midst of concerns about the new voting restrictions and the effort of the Trump administration to redo the federal agencies that, they said, helped the United States to be a democracy for all.
“This country was not a democracy for blacks until that happened,” Mauldin said about voting rights. “And we are still constantly fighting to make that a more concrete reality for ourselves.”
Speaking in the pulpit of the historic Baptist Church of the Tabernacle of the city, the site of the first mass meeting of the voting rights movement, the leader of the minority of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, said what happened in Selma changed the nation. But he said that the 60th anniversary arrives at a time when there are “problems everywhere” 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 American representative Terri Sewell, D-ana., Said they are gathering in Selma for the 60th anniversary “at a time when the vote is in danger.”
Sewell 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 the new voting laws with the Department of Justice with the Department of Justice with the Department of Justice
Sewell this week reinto the legislation to restore the requirement. The proposal has stagnated repeatedly in Congress. The legislation bears the name of John Lewis, the late Congressman of Georgia who was on the front of the bloody Sunday of March.
The annual celebration will conclude with a ceremony and will march through the Edmund Pettus bridge. At that time, Sunday’s bloody protesters entered couples through the Selma bridge. Mauldin was in the third torque of the line led by Lewis and Ossa Williams.
“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 in an interview with Associated Press.
Mauldin, who hit the head, said he believes that the law agents were trying to incite a riot while attacked protesters.
Kirk Carrington was only 13 years old at Bloody Sunday. As violence broke out, a white man on a horse who wielded a stick was pursued by all the way back to public housing projects where his family lived.
Carrington said he began to march after witnessing that his father was belittled by his white employers when his father returned from the service in World War II. Standing in the Baptist Church of the Tabernacle, where he was trained in non -violent protest tactics 60 years before, they cried him thinking about what the people of his city achieved.
“When we started marching, we didn’t know the impact we would have on the United States. We knew after growing and we grew up that the impact that not only had on Selma, but the impact it had throughout the world, ”said Carrington.
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 in federal agencies. Trump has pressed to end the diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government.
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.
