The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 79/No. 9      March 16, 2015

 
(front page)
Selma, Ala., anniversary march
challenges erosion of voting rights
 
BY MAGGIE TROWE
Fifty years ago the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights started with a brutal assault by cops and deputized thugs on Black rights demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and culminated in a rally of more than 25,000 on the steps of the Alabama state Capitol, leading to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others are organizing to retrace the 1965 march to challenge the erosion of voting rights in the U.S. today.

The 54-mile march will begin in Selma on Sunday, March 8, and conclude with a rally on the steps of the state Capitol Friday, March 13.

“This is not just a March in Commemoration, but it is also a March in Recommitment to Voting Rights,” Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette, SCLC board chair, told a Feb. 20 press conference held in the state Capitol.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, conquered by the mass proletarian movement of African-Americans and their allies in the 1950s and ’60s that overthrew Jim Crow segregation, banned literacy tests, poll taxes and other racist measures designed to prevent Blacks from voting or running for office.

However, in the wake of the June 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down key parts of that act, a number of states have instituted laws restricting the ability of working people to vote.

“From voter photo ID, proof of citizenship to register and reduction in voting and voter registration days to the Shelby County v. Holder [2013] decision gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act and more,” Alabama State Sen. Hank Sanders said at the Feb. 20 press conference, “Americans are losing the right to vote, which so many people sacrificed their lives and blood to secure.”

The 5-4 Supreme Court decision voided the section of the Voting Rights Act that required states and local governments with a long history of racist discrimination to get prior approval from the Justice Department before making any changes in voting laws.

A number of different activities, organized by a variety of groups, are planned in Selma March 7 to commemorate the “Bloody Sunday” 1965 attack on the bridge. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush say they will attend one of the events.

On March 21, 1965, about 3,200 people set out again from Selma, this time under the protection of federal troops. They marched about 12 miles a day and slept in fields at night, arriving in Montgomery on March 25 with their ranks swelled to 25,000 strong.

Entertainers, including actor Danny Glover and singers Kirk Franklin, Ruben Studdard, Lady Tramaine Hawkins, The Blind Boys of Alabama and Richard Smallwood, will join in events in Selma March. 5-9. Some will participate in the march.

Leaders of the 1965 march will take part, including Diane Nash, then a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She helped organize the Freedom Rides in 1961.

The march will go through Lowndes County, where efforts to defend African-Americans against racist violence and to register Black voters led to the formation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in 1966, a group independent of the Democrats and Republicans that ran its own candidates with a black panther as its emblem.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home