Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of 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 shot by a state trooper in nearby Marion. At the apex of the span over the Alabama River, the AP reports, they saw what awaited them: a line of state troopers, deputies, and men on horseback. As they approached, officers gave a warning to disperse and then unleashed violence. "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.
On Sunday, Selma marked the 60th anniversary of what became known as "Bloody Sunday." The attack shocked the nation and galvanized support for the US Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 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 in the face of 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. "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, US 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." Like the marchers of Bloody Sunday, he said, supporters must keep going. 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 eye contact. 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's a tragedy of 60 years later: What we are looking at now is a return to the 1950s."
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