Greene County Democrat

Tag: Betty Boynton and Charles Mauldin.

  • 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.

  • National Voting Rights Museum in Selma sponsors ‘Remembrance and Recommitment Ceremony’ for
    the 57th anniversary of the passage of the 1965
    Voting Rights Act

    Voting Rights foot soldiers tell stories of the Selma Movement as part of the 57th anniversary
    of the 1965 Voting Right Act.
    Voting Rights foot soldiers honored by young people. L to R: Margaret Howard, Jeanette Howard, Jimmy Reynolds., Betty Boynton and Charles Mauldin.

    Special to the Democrat by John Zippert, Co-Publisher

    The National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, Alabama, on August 6, 2022 sponsored a ‘Remembrance and Recommitment Ceremony’ for the 57th anniversary of the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

    The program included a slow-ride of about fifty vehicles from Browns Chapel Church, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to a rally on the eastern side in the Memorial Park. The rally stressed the importance of recommitting to voter registration, education, and involvement to overcome the efforts at voter suppression and gutting of the Voter Rights Act in recent years by the U. S. Supreme Court.

    The rally ended with a litany dedicated to revitalizing the voting rights struggle and passage of the John Lewis Voter Advancement Act which has thus far been blocked in the U. S. Senate by a Republican filibuster.

    The program then moved across Highway 80 to the National Voting Rights Museum Building for an afternoon of story telling by the veteran foot-soldiers who participated in the Selma Voting Rights Movement of the 1960’s and were part of the Bloody Sunday March in 1965.

    Rev. Bernard Lafayette, a SNCC organizer who choose to come to Selma to work on voting rights in 1963 after the Freedom Rides and serving three weeks in the infamous Parchman Prison in Mississippi, said, “We started organizing young people  because they were available and willing; they could not be fired from a job for agitating and marching because they didn’t have a job. We recruited in the high schools and held classes with young people on their rights, non-violence, and social change theory. When the time came, we had a ready group of people who were the key to the movement in Selma.”

    Charles Mauldin, a teenager at 15, was one of the students that Rev. Lafayette reached in 1963 and 1964. He and other student leaders, Terry Shaw, Betty Fikes, and others started boycotting the schools and working for justice in Selma. “My parents were among the first to register to vote in Selma after 1965. They encouraged me and other young people to fight in the movement. It was not an option to be scared. We knew we were taking on the power of the State of Alabama, but we did what we had to do. Mauldin can be seen near the front of the 1965 march, in pictures of Bloody Sunday.

    Jimmy Reynolds, another sixties foot soldier said, “I had trouble at first with non-violence. I was not going to turn away when I was hit but after attending mass meetings with my aunt, I joined the movement. I was part of the strategy committee. Dallas County Sheriff, Jim Clarke arrested us in 1963 demonstrations and took us to three jails. We wound up at Camp Camden for about three weeks.

    Betty White Boynton, wife of Bruce Boynton and daughter-in-law of Amelia Boynton Robinson, who invited Dr. King to Selma, said she was active as well as a teenager in 1963-65. “I was arrested several times and went to Camp Selma on Highway 80. The conditions were not suitable for human beings, but we kept on working for change,” she said. On Bloody Sunday, she came to Brown’s Chapel at the end of the march to assist people who were beaten and teargassed.

    Dr. Joe Reed, head of the Alabama Democratic Conference and state Black teachers’ association said he started activities in his home county of Conecuh and was a student sit in leader at Alabama State in the 1960’s. He participated in the founding meetings for SNCC. By 1965, he was already leading the Black teachers in the state, and he helped Rev. Fred Reese and Marie Foster to help teachers who were involved in the movement.

    Two sisters from Marion, Alabama, Margaret, and Jeanette Howard, also gave testimony on the fatal shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson, by a state trooper, while he was protecting his grandfather from attack by the police in February 1965, in the Perry County seat of Marion, Alabama. Both sisters were recruited out of high school by Albert Turner, legendary SCLC Alabama State Director. Both sisters said they were on the bridge on Bloody Sunday.
    Margaret said, “I could run a little faster than my sister, so I was not beaten. But we both went to Camp Selma. We had grits for breakfast, bologna sandwiches for lunch, and peas for dinner. It was a pretty tough place to be for teenagers.”

    The program concluded with young people placing medals of achievement around the necks of the foot soldiers to honor them for their courage and bravery in the battle for civil and voting rights.