Greene County Democrat

Tag: 1965

  • Newswire : ‘Bloody Sunday’ 60th anniversary marked in Selma with remembrances and concerns about the future

    State troopers swing billy clubs to break up a civil rights voting march in Selma, Ala., on Bloody Sunday.AP files

    By The Associated Press

    SELMA, Ala. — Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights marchers walking in pairs across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.
    The marchers were protesting white officials’ refusal to allow Black Alabamians to register to vote, as well as the killing days earlier of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a minister and voting rights organizer who was shot by a state trooper in nearby Marion.
    At the apex of the span over the Alabama River, they saw what awaited them: a line of state troopers, deputies and men on horseback. After they approached, law enforcement gave a warning to disperse and then unleashed violence.
    “Within about a minute or a half, they took their billy clubs, holding it on both ends, began to push us back, back us up, and then they began to beat men, women and children, and tear gas men, women and children, and cattle prod men, women and children viciously,” said Mauldin, who was 17 at the time.
    Mauldin is the founder of the Saturday morning ‘Footsoldiers Breakfast’ at the Bridge Crossing Jubilee, at which persons who participated in the march tell their stories
    Selma on Sunday marked the 60th anniversary of the clash that became known as Bloody Sunday. The attack shocked the nation and galvanized support for the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965. The annual commemoration paid homage to those who fought to secure voting rights for Black Americans and brought calls to recommit to the fight for equality.
    For foot soldiers of the movement, the celebration comes amid concerns about new voting restrictions and the Trump administration’s effort to remake federal agencies they said helped make America a democracy for all.
    “This country was not a democracy for Black folks until that happened,” Mauldin said of voting rights. “And we’re still constantly fighting to make that a more concrete reality for ourselves.”
    Speaking at the pulpit of the city’s historic Tabernacle Baptist Church, the site of the first mass meeting of the voting rights movement, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said what happened in Selma changed the nation. But he said the 60th anniversary comes at a time when there is “trouble all around” and some “want to whitewash our history.” But he said like the marchers of Bloody Sunday, they must keep going.
    “At this moment, faced with trouble on every side, we’ve got to press on,” Jeffries said to the crowd that included the Rev. Jesse Jackson, multiple members of Congress and others gathered for the commemoration.
    U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., said they are gathering in Selma for the 60th anniversary “at a time when the vote is in peril.”

    Sewell noted the number of voting restrictions introduced since the U.S. Supreme Court, in Shelby County vs. Holder, effectively abolished a key part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear new voting laws with the Justice Department
    Sewell this week reintroduced legislation to restore the requirement. The proposal has repeatedly stalled in Congress. The legislation is named for John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman who was at the lead of the Bloody Sunday march.
    The annual celebration will conclude with a ceremony and march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. At the time, the Bloody Sunday marchers walked in pairs across the Selma bridge. Mauldin was in the third pair of the line led by Lewis and Hosea Williams.
    “We had steeled our nerves to a point where we were so determined that we were willing to confront. It was past being courageous. We were determined, and we were indignant,” Mauldin recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. Mauldin, who took a blow to the head, said he believes law enforcement officers were trying to incite a riot as they attacked marchers.
    Kirk Carrington was just 13 on Bloody Sunday. As the violence erupted, a white man on a horse wielding a stick a chased him all the way back to the public housing projects in Selma where his family lived.
    Carrington said he started marching after witnessing his father get belittled by his white employers when his father returned from service in World War II. Standing in Tabernacle Baptist Church where he was trained in non-violent protest tactics 60 years earlier, he was brought to tears thinking about what the people of his city achieved.
    “When we started marching, we did not know the impact we would have in America. We knew after we got older and got grown that the impact it not only had in Selma, but the impact it had in the entire world,” Carrington said.
    Dr. Verdell Lett Dawson, who grew up in Selma, remembers a time when she was expected to lower her gaze if she passed a white person on the street to avoid making eye contact.
    Dawson and Mauldin said they are concerned about the potential dismantling of the Department of Education and other changes to federal agencies. Trump has pushed to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government.
    Support from the federal government “is how Black Americans have been able to get justice, to get some semblance of equality, because left to states’ rights, it is going to be the white majority that’s going to rule,” Dawson said.“That that’s a tragedy of 60 years later: what we are looking at now is a return to the 1950s,” Dawson said.

  • Shomari Figures headlines commemoration of 59th anniversary of signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act at the bridge in Selma

    Shomari Figures and Hank Sanders speaking in Selma

    By John Zippert, Co-Publisher

    Shomari Figures, the Democratic candidate for the new 2nd Congressional District in Alabama, was the headline speaker at yesterday’s rally and strategy session in Selma, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to commemorate the 59th anniversary of the signing by President Lyndon B. Johnson of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

    Figures is the candidate selected by the Democratic Primary in April 2024 to run for the new Congressional District that stretches from Russell County at the Georgia line and goes to Pritchard, in Mobile County, almost at the Mississippi line. This district was created after a five-year legal battle between voters in the district and the Alabama Legislature to create a second Congressional district in the state that could elect a Black congressional representative.

    The U. S. Supreme Court ruled, using Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, that Alabama’s 27% Black population deserved two districts, out of the seven in Alabama, that could elect a Black congressperson. Figures won the Democratic primary and will face Caroleene Dobson, a white attorney from Troy, Alabama, who is well funded and supported by ALFA and other right-wing groups in Alabama.

    Figures is the son of Michael and Vivian Figures of Mobile County, both of whom served in the Alabama State Senate. Vivian being named to and later elected to the seat that Michael held until his untimely death from a brain aneurism.

    Alabama’s 7th district incumbent Congresswoman Terri Sewell sent a video tape to the meeting, since she was working in Washington, D. C., to commemorate the passage of the 1965 VRA and urging passage of the John Lewis Voter Advancement Act which would restore the full strength of the VRA.

    In his remarks in Selma, Shomari Figures said, “I have to come to Selma, even though it is not in the new 2nd. Congressional District, because all Black people in political office or running for political office, owe a debt to the courageous people of Selma and surrounding areas, that can never be repaid.” He also thanked Hank and Faya Rose Sanders for their continuing work on voting and civil rights and their friendship with his family.

    Figures said,” This is one of the most important Congressional races in the nation. We can take a district from the Republicans and put it in the Democratic Party’s column, which will affect the overall control of the House of Representatives. This will be important in determining what legislation gets through the next Congress.”

    “This is not a coronation. I know that just because we won the Democratic nomination, does not mean that we will win the General Election on November 5th. We have a lot of campaigning to do in the twelve counties of the new district. We are running against a rich candidate who is well funded with campaign contributions of her own and others. We did not get into this to cpme out in second place!” ,said Figures.

    Other speakers at the rally included Charles Steele of SCLC who explained that “Freedom ain’t free, and we have to continue fighting for it and things like the Voting Rights Act!”

    Joe Reed, long-time President of the Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC) said he has been working all of his life to place Blacks in every chamber of government from City Hall to the White House. Reed warned, “If you listen to Trump, he says he is going to abolish the Constitution and we will not have to vote anymore. Abolishing the Constitution means abolishing the 13th. Amendment, which freed the slaves. Does he intend to take us back into slavery. Listen closely to what he is saying.”

    Reed told the story of trying to get an old Black lady to vote. “In an election you have to vote. She told me that she would pray for me. I had to tell her in elections they do not count prayers – only votes!’

    Two youth speakers spoke, Micah Thomas and Azali Fortier, why made the point that young people must participate and vote. Rebecca Marion of the Bridge Crossing Jubilee also made clear that voting was a right that had been fought for at the cost of people’s lives and that everyone who is eligible must vote.

    Amin Badat of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, representatives of the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice and John Zippert, speaking for the SaveOurselves Coalition for Justice and Democracy also spoke.
    Faya Rose Toure mentioned that Sam Walker of the National Voting Rights Museum had a stroke and was in the hospital trying to recover. A “Go Fund Me Account” has been set up to help with his medical expenses. Walker has always coordinated logistics for the Bridge Crossing Jubilee and other activities in Selma.

    Persons interested in supporting the campaign of Shomari Figures for Congress in District 2, may go to this website: figures4congress.com/27?t=JrG5Aj, to contribute.

  • President Biden renews commitment to passage of John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act at Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee

    L To R: President Joe Biden, Cong. Terri Sewell, Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson in wheelchair, rolled by son Cong. Jonathan Jackson, Krysten Clarke and Spiver W. Gordon
    Attorney Faya Rose Toure addresses gathering at Commemoration March.
    Rev. Jesse Jackson receives special tribute at Unity Breakfast.
    Senator Hank Sanders at Martin and Coretta Unity Breakfast Rev. Martin Luther King III sitting at right
    Freedom Singers bring inspiration throughout Jubilee.

    At Sunday’s rally at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, President Biden renewed his commitment to passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, even if it requires waiving the U. S. Senate’s filibuster rules.

    Biden accompanied by foot soldiers, current civil rights leaders and thousands of marchers crossed the bridge in the annual reenactment of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ march – March 7, 1965, when 600 marchers were met and beaten by hundreds of Alabama State Troopers and Sheriffs deputies. Later that month, Dr. Martin Luther King led marchers from Selma to Montgomery, completing the march and paving the way for passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    In his statement, President Biden said: “The right to vote, to have your vote counted is the threshold of democracy and liberty,” 
 “This fundamental right remains under assault. Conservative Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act over the years. Since the 2020 election, a wave of states has passed dozens, dozens of anti-voting laws fueled by the big lie,” he insisted.
 The President continued. “We must redouble our efforts and renew our commitment to protecting the freedom to vote. “We know that we must get the votes in Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Freedom to Vote Act. I’ve made it clear: I will not let a filibuster obstruct the sacred right to vote.”
    In his comments President Biden urged passage of the George Floyd Police Reform Act to implement changes in the criminal justice system across the nation. He also urged passage of a ban on assault weapons, like the AR-15, which have hurt people in recent multiple shootings at schools, theaters, and shopping centers.
    The President called for building the economy from “the bottom up and the middle out; and for the rich to pay their fair share of taxes.” He said that he was ready to stand by Selma and other places in the state ravaged by recent storms to rebuild better than in the past. He said over $8 million had already been distributed under the FEMA disaster declaration for the January 12th tornados.
    Biden was introduced by Charles Mauldin, a foot soldier, who was in the third row of marchers on Bloody Sunday. Mauldin explained that all Black public officials and others registered and voting under the 1965 Voting Rights Act owed a debt to the 600 ordinary people from Selma and surrounding areas who decided that they would take action to make a change.
    Mauldin initiated a “Foot Soldiers Breakfast” on Saturday morning of the Bridge Crossing Jubilee, ten years ago, to honor those who participated in Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights Movement in Selma. At this year’s breakfast, the foot soldiers organization announced they had secured a property near the Carver Housing Project for a “Foot Soldiers Memorial Park” to recognize the contributions of the foot soldiers and to inspire the next generations to become active in positive social change for the Selma community.
    Faya Rose Toure, Selma attorney, civil rights activist, and co-founder, with her husband, Hank Sanders, of the Bridge Crossing Jubilee, which was celebrating its 30th anniversary, also spoke on the program at the foot of the bridge with President Biden.
    Toure said racism is still active and blatant in the Alabama Black Belt along with immense poverty and an abusive criminal justice system. She pointed out to the President, “Not a single white elected official is present on the stage or in the VIP seating for the event. Also, there are less that ten local white citizens involved in the Bridge Crossing Jubilee program. There is no school in the Alabama Black Belt, an area of majority Black population that teaches Black History!”
    Commenting on the recent tornados, Toure said, “Mr. President. Not only must we build back Selma better, but we must also build back Selma fairer, if we are interested in justice and progress for the people of Selma and surrounding communities.
    Toure also told the President, “I do not think you are too old to run again. My mother said the Blacker the berry; the older the berry, the sweeter the juice … “
    A number of the people on the stage and in the VIP seating for the President’s address, had participated earlier in the annual Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast. Among them, Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was in a wheelchair, Congresswoman Terri Sewell and other members of the Black Congressional Caucus, Rev. William Barber of the Poor Peoples Campaign, Dr. Joseph Mitchell, President of Wallace Community College, Barbara Arnwine of the Transformative Justice Coalition, Maya Wiley, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Cliff Albright, Black Voters Matter, and many others.