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selma
Juneteenth and the Fight for Justice in Selma and Beyond
Juneteenth is a reminder of why the march for liberty and justice is not over, but a moment to recommit to the work ahead.
Jun 19, 2025
At Foot Soldiers Park, Juneteenth is more than a date on the calendar. It’s a declaration, a call to always remember, to resist, and to continue to reimagine what freedom looks like.
For the last four years Juneteenth has become a commemoration of historic significance that has become more powerful and more necessary. As a community, we gather not just to honor history, we gather to face the present and to envision a better future rooted in truth, justice, and collective power.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were finally told they were free—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. That delay wasn’t a historical oversight, it was an intentional strategy of suppression that today, still shows up through the systems we confront daily.
We celebrate because freedom was never handed to us, we claimed it in 1865, in 1965, and we must claim it today.
Today one thing is clear, slavery didn’t end, it evolved. It’s been institutionalized in the form of mass incarceration, labor exploitation, generational poverty, voter suppression, and policies that consistently and disproportionately harm Black and Brown communities. One-hundred and sixty years later, Black and Brown people are still profiled, surveilled, underpaid, and denied full access to justice.
And yet, we are still here. Still resisting. Still building our communities up. Still rising.
Our hometown Selma is ground zero for the struggle for voting rights and the fight for the socioeconomic prosperity of people of color in our country. We both span two generations of Black people in Selma. One of us was among the 600 foot soldiers who bravely marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and demanded voting rights for Black people—ultimately leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The other one of us was raised to carry that spirit of activism and determination to protect and preserve those rights for generations to come.
In 2021, at a historic moment for our country, we founded Foot Soldiers Park to preserve Selma’s legacy, memorialize the stories of the everyday people who fueled the civil rights movement, and to position the city’s historical significance into an engine for liberation, economic development, and racial justice.
With a mission rooted in the legacy of Selma’s foot soldiers, we don’t shy away from the truth, we walk directly into it. Because that’s where change is born and transformation begins. We don’t just preserve history, we activate it. We innovate. We organize. We lead.
Juneteenth is a reminder of why the march for liberty and justice is not over, but a moment to recommit to the work ahead.
Despite Selma’s historical significance in shaping the very fabric of this country, the majority-Black city is still struggling to overcome generations of institutional racism and overall neglect. Forty-one percent of the population lives in poverty. Thirty-percent are suffering from food insecurity, and an abysmal $27,000 a year is the average income in the city.
When we founded Foot Soldiers Park, we had a clear goal—to transform Selma; ask hard questions; and set a bold agenda to build generational wealth, protect our civil rights, and empower our youth to lead. We are campaigning to fund Selma’s first-ever community and education center, and foot soldiers memorial. This urgently needed hub will be a beacon for leaders, students, and educators to weave the rich tapestry of Selma’s civil rights movement and serve as a conduit for ongoing scholarship in this critical field. As our civil rights are again under attack, we’ll serve as a catalyst for community-led action and civic participation, healing and restoration, youth engagement and activation—building the bench for the next generation of political, business, and social justice leaders.
This Juneteenth we need to face the truth—there will be no erasure. What our history shows is how resilience can lead to transformation. Generation after generation we have turned pain into purpose, and memory into motivation to design systems that move us closer to justice.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A right delayed is a right denied.” Juneteenth reminds us that justice delayed is not justice at all. Freedom withheld is not freedom for all. And the arc of the moral universe does not bend unless we bend it. Together.
For us Juneteenth is not just symbolic. It is sacred. It is strategic. It is where truth, joy, memory, and action converge.
Every year we celebrate because our people’s story does not end in chains. We celebrate because our ancestors did more than survive; they organized, educated, resisted, and loved. We celebrate because freedom was never handed to us, we claimed it in 1865, in 1965, and we must claim it today.
In Selma, we never rest and we don’t sugarcoat the truth. We are the foot soldiers of 1965 and the foot soldiers of tomorrow—as agents of change, we will keep marching forward.
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Dem Leaders Urged to Mark Bloody Sunday by Acting on Voting Rights, Economic Justice
"This is no time for foolishness, photo-ops, and flaky commitments," declares a letter from faith leaders including Bishop William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Poor People's Campaign.
Feb 20, 2023
" Selma is sacred ground. It is, in a very real sense, the delivery room where the possibility of a true democracy was born. It is no place to play or to be for political pretense. Either you're serious or not. If you're coming, come on Sunday, the actual day of remembrance. If you're coming, come with a commitment to fight for what these people were willing to give their lives for."
That's the message that faith and rights leaders sent in a Monday letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and members of Congress ahead of the anniversary of Bloody Sunday—when white police officers violently assaulted civil rights advocates, including future Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama on March 7, 1965.
The sign-on letter is led by the co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival—Bishop William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis—along with former Democratic Alabama state Sen. Hank Sanders, Faya Rose Touré, Rev. Mark Thompson, Rebecca Marion, and Rev. Carolyn Foster. It is open for signature on the Repairers of the Breach website.
"#SelmaIsSacredGround, not a place for political pretense."
"This is a critical year in the life of our country," the seven initial signatories wrote. "On the one hand, the president and progressive members of Congress have fought to pass policies that have lifted up Americans in many ways. From Covid relief measures to infrastructure investments to child tax credits that lifted millions of children out of poverty (for a brief moment) to the appointment of the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice, we can celebrate some real progress."
"But, on the other hand, with a Democratic president and control of the House and Senate for two years, Democratic leadership was unable to raise the federal minimum wage," they continued, also noting that a few obstructionist Democrats repeatedly helped Senate Republicans block efforts to restore the Voting Rights Act by supporting the filibuster.
That obstruction, they explained, enabled "regressive legislative bodies across the nation to pass more voter suppression bills than any time since Jim Crow and to go through another round of dangerous redistricting, which nullifies the potential power of progressive voting coalitions by stacking and packing votes in certain districts to predetermine outcomes before any vote is cast."
Highlighting research that shows tens of millions of Americans face some form of voter suppression, the letter leaders argue that if Biden and other politicians plan to visit Selma—which was recently devastated by a tornado—for the Bloody Sunday anniversary, they should "declare that the fight for voting rights and the restoration of what they marched across that bridge for is not over."
The letter also demands urgent action on living wages and investments in rural areas, stressing that millions of people—particularly in Southern states—live "in poverty and low-wealth conditions" and remain "uninsured or underinsured at a time when we have more people on healthcare than ever before," three years into the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Those of us who are planning to be in Selma to honor the struggle for voting rights and economic justice should be willing to protest and engage nonviolently if politicians attempt to do moral harm to the memory and the sacredness of what happened on Bloody Sunday," declares the letter. "This is no time for foolishness, photo-ops, and flaky commitments."
"Let us be clear: To honor the memory of Bloody Sunday is to work for the full restoration of the Voting Rights Act, the passage of the original For the People Act that John Lewis helped to write, not the bill that was watered down by Joe Manchin," the letter continues, calling out the pro-filibuster West Virginia Democrat infamous for thwarting his own party's agenda.
"To commemorate Bloody Sunday," the letter adds, "is to commit to raising of the minimum wage to a living wage, to ensuring that every American has adequate healthcare, and to enacting economic development that touches poor and low-wealth communities."
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This Vote That I Have...
We must come together as a coalition powerful enough to end and overcome the suppression and organize the resurrection of fusion politics in the South.
Mar 12, 2022
The following are the prepared remarks from Bishop William J. Barber II, president and senior lecture of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, delivered March 11, 2022, on last day of the Selma-to-Montgomery march which started earlier in the week.
Since we left Selma on Monday morning, I had to make a detour to Memphis to stand with Starbucks workers who were fired for trying to organize a union. And as I was driving from that march back to this one, I thought about how movements are always about the people. Yes, we march for freedom. Yes, we march for justice. But we do it because we know and love people who are bound; people who suffer from injustice.
The fight for voting rights today is and must be always connected to the fight to address the poverty that impacts 140 million Americans.
And I thought to myself, why don't we insist on naming the bridge and highway after the people who motivate us in this struggle? I wasn't in Selma with you because I hate a former Klansman named Edmund Pettus. No, I was there because I loved and learned from every foot soldier.
Why don't we call it the "People's Bridge" and place the names of every person killed? Jimmie Lee Jackson. James Reeb. Viola Liuzzo. Why don't we place the name of every foot soldier beaten, Amelia Boynton, John Lewis and every person who eventually crossed, the lawyers who fought the legal battles?
When I look down from these steps today, I'm not here because George Wallace once thought this state house would stand as an eternal fortress against desegregation. No, I'm here because the preacher who learned to be a pastor at that little church down there on the left stood here 57 years ago and taught some history that we desperately need to remember now. Here's what Dr. King said when they arrived on March 25th, 1965.
"Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened." (The movement began uniting the Negro and white masses especially poor into a voting bloc made up of all people that threatened to drive the southern aristocracy and money interests from the command posts of political power in the South.)
To meet this threat, the Southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer the development of a segregated society. Racism is rooted in the fear of a restructuring of the American economic architecture to help everyone. So Dr. King stood here and taught a history lesson. Listen to what he said:
"Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. That's what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would pray upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away with.
We must remember this today.
There is not a state in the South where the voting population is under 40% poor and low-income people. One-third of America's poor live in the South. If we remember the original wisdom and political understanding of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, we have an opportunity to galvanize enough of this demographic to change the South and change the nation.
The South is not so much a Red voting region; it is a voter suppression region, an abandoned region, where far too many politicians--Black and white, Democrats and Republicans--ignore the power of poor and low-wealth voters.
Today, for those of us raised in the South and who live in the South, our work must be to keep building a moral fusion movement. We must come together as a coalition powerful enough to end and overcome the suppression and organize the resurrection of fusion politics in the South. We must build power to enact a Third Reconstruction agenda to end systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the denial of healthcare, the disabling of public education, the war economy, and the false, distorted narrative of religious nationalism for the saving of the soul of this country.
(Watch the full speech, which begins at approximately 1:59:06, here)
Selma-to-Montgomery was not about personality. And it wasn't just Black people on that march. It was a direct action in a moral movement to change the soul of the country, obtaining the full promise of democracy. Voting policy was key to the vision then, and this should be our focus today:
- Mobilizing voters
- Marching in the street
- Moving in nonviolent civil disobedience
Moral movements are never just about one issue. They have always been and should be about building power to change systems for uplift of the masses, especially the poor.
When Dr. King stood here and gave the "why" for their march, he listed:
- challenging segregated housing (ghetto or social and economic depression) until Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing.
- challenging every vestige of segregated and inferior education.
- challenging poverty until wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi are filled, idle industries of Appalachia are realized and revitalized, and broken lives in sweltering ghettos are mended and remolded.
He said, Let us march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena.
Replaced by people who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.
And this should still be our spirit today.
The fight for voting rights today is and must be always connected to the fight to address the poverty that impacts 140 million Americans. The 87 million Americans who are uninsured or under-insured. The 4 million who can buy unleaded gas but can't get unleaded water in their homes.
The 31 million working people who do not earn $15 an hour.
Regressive corporate money is trying to block voting rights and create gerrymandered districts that determine who can be elected before votes even cast, because they oppose the people's agenda on all of these issues.
Voting rights and labor rights are the same fight along with living wages, health care, immigrant, and LGBTQ rights.
We cannot win on any one of these issues unless we come together and fight voter suppression that may target Black and brown people, but IT HURTS US ALL.
In Hebrews, the word for vote is the same word for voice--kol.
Kol: My voice comes from God. Kol: My vote comes from God.
This is why, for us, voting rights is a moral issue. We demand Democrats bring the original For the People Act that John Lewis helped to write back before the Senate.
We demand to bring back to the floor a full restoration of the Voting Rights Act.
We demand a vote on living wages.
We will march and protest and even put our bodies on the line because this kol we have...this vote we have... this power we have.
God gave it to me. The world didn't give it to me. And the world can't take it away.
___
The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is holding a 10-state Mobilization leading to the Mass Poor People's Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. This program on June 18th is not just a day of action but a declaration of an ongoing, committed moral movement.
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Anniversary of Selma Should Remind Americans How Democracy Is Defended
African Americans won the right to vote because we and our allies marched for it, demonstrated for it, were beaten and died to gain it. After Selma, people of conscience demanded that the country live up to its Constitution and its democratic ideals.
Mar 08, 2022
Politicians for both parties loudly praise the courage of Ukrainians defending their democracy from the Russian invasion. Yet, bipartisan defense of democracy disappears when the question is democracy at home. Mar. 7 marked the 57th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday" in 1965, when the police attack of a peaceful march of Blacks seeking the right to vote in Selma, Alabama, stirred the outrage that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act.
At stake is the direction of the country. Republicans have voted against raising the minimum wage, paid family leave, support for families with children, affordable day care, affordable prescription drugs, and fair taxes on the rich.
Today the right to vote is once more in question.
We witness the second great drive to suppress voting in American history. The first came after the Civil War, when the constitutional amendment to free the slaves and guarantee the right to vote to African Americans sparked a vicious reaction across the South to enforce segregation and suppress the right to vote.
Today, Republican politicians are making it harder to vote, particularly for those in urban areas, on Native American reservations and on college campuses. In July 2021, the Brennan Center reported that lawmakers had introduced at least 389 restrictive bills in 48 states in the 2021 legislative sessions, while 17 states enacted 28 new laws that restrict voting access.
Partisan gerrymandering has been given a free pass by right-wing judges on the Supreme Court. Worse, election officials are under assault. One in six have received threats of violence; one in three say they feel unsafe. As President Joe Biden declared, "We're facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War."
The reason for the assault is clear. After 2020, Republicans know that they are the minority and their prospects are getting worse with younger, more diverse voters. In the last presidential election, Donald Trump captured a stunning 74 million votes, but Joe Biden won 81 million.
When the House of Representatives took up legislation to revive the Voting Rights Act, what used to enjoy bipartisan support was passed, but with a partisan divide. Similarly, when the Senate considered the For the People Act to create federal safeguards on voting rights, limit the role of secret money in politics and rein in gerrymandering, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah described it as a bill "written in Hell by the Devil himself." Republicans used a filibuster to block passage of both bills.
The anniversary of Selma reminds us of how democracy is defended. Southern senators blocked any reforms at the federal level for years. In the states, police and organized terror enforced the suppression of Black votes.
African Americans won the right to vote because we and our allies marched for it, demonstrated for it, were beaten and died to gain it. And finally, after Selma, people of conscience demanded that the country live up to its Constitution and its democratic ideals. That is when President Lyndon Johnson could overcome the filibuster and pass the Voting Rights Act.
If the new voter suppression effort is to be overcome, it won't come from the White House or Congress. The Justice Department will do its best, but will face obstruction from right-wing judges. In states controlled by Republicans, the onslaught is brazen and clear.
What is needed now is massive, unrelenting, passionate organizing to register people to vote and to get them to the polls. Mobilized people won't be intimidated. With organization, the tricks and traps passed to suppress the vote can be overcome. Workers will have to sacrifice if early voting hours are restricted. Urban voters will have to put up with long lines, since polling sites are being eliminated. Mail-in ballots will face more obstacles. College students may need to organize the ID needed to qualify to vote on their campuses.
At stake is the direction of the country. Republicans have voted against raising the minimum wage, paid family leave, support for families with children, affordable day care, affordable prescription drugs, and fair taxes on the rich. They oppose action on catastrophic climate change. They vote against reproductive choice, civil rights, environmental and worker protections. They oppose tuition-free college and student debt relief.
All of these are supported by the vast majority of Americans. So, Republicans try to make voting harder.
We don't have to risk the bullets of the Ku Klux Klan or the billy clubs of Southern sheriffs as the marchers of Selma faced. We do have to organize to make our voices heard and our votes cast and counted. Historically, the core of the reform majority--African Americans, Hispanics, single women, the young--turn out in smaller numbers in off-year elections.
We can't afford that this year. At stake is literally what kind of country we will live in.
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Good Trouble Lives On: John Lewis Memorial Will Replace Confederate Monument
In an enduring tribute to his stubborn struggle "to save America from herself," Georgia officials this week voted to create a memorial to civil rights icon John Lewis in a historic square where an obelisk honoring Conferederate soldiers, aptly titled The Lost Cause, stood for over 100 years. Activists hope to portray Lewis in his Bloody Sunday trench coat and backpack, a symbol of young people as "catalysts for change in the world" and "a giant of a man with a humble heart. He met no strangers."
Jan 28, 2021
The Edmund Pettus Bridge
In an enduring tribute to his resolute work "to save America from herself," Georgia officials this week moved to replace hate with hope by approving a memorial to civil rights icon John Lewis in a Decatur square where an obelisk honoring Confederate soldiers, aptly titled The Lost Cause, stood for over 100 years. The unanimous vote by DeKalb County commissioners marked the culmination of a months-long effort by a Commemorative Task Force to determine how best to honor Lewis's extraordinary life and civil rights legacy. Lewis died in July at age 80 from complications of pancreatic cancer, having battled his last few months through "good days and days not so good." Born in 1940, he was the third of 10 children born to Jim-Crow-era Alabama sharecroppers. After meeting and being inspired by Martin Luther King at 18 - "Dr. King was speaking to me" - he found his spiritual and political home in the civil rights movement, quickly going on to become chairman of SNCC, one of the "Big Six" leaders who planned the 1963 March on Washington, and, at 23, its youngest speaker, declaring to massive crowds at the Lincoln Memorial, "We want our freedom and we want it now!" In 1965, he led the seminal march at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge that helped prompt passage of the Voting Rights Act. Arrested 40-plus times, Lewis served over 30 years in Congress, representing Georgia's Fifth District and becoming known as the ever-honorable "conscience of Congress." A towering figure of fierce moral clarity, he remained true to his principles till the end; weeks before his death, he visited Black Lives Matter protests in D.C. to support the lifelong activism he famously dubbed "good trouble."
To many in Decatur, a progressive suburb of Atlanta, it's deeply gratifying that a beloved civil rights luminary who championed voting rights will supplant the much-reviled, oft-graffitied, 30-foot Lost Cause, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy before the County Courthouse in 1908 - the same year Georgia's legislators ratified an amendment to prevent African-Americans from voting. In 2017, after home-grown Nazis marched in Charlottesville, residents delivered a petition to city officials urging the monument be removed as "a symbol of white nationalism." In June, amidst BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder, a judge finally ordered its removal as "a public nuisance." Decatur officials consider the historic courthouse site, encompassing both Lewis' district and the county seat, "the most fitting" to honor their own "American hero." "John was a giant of a man, with a humble heart," said one. "He met no strangers, and he truly was a man who loved the people." The Decatur-based Beacon Hill Alliance for Human Rights has proposed the statue depict a young Lewis, in the trench coat and backpack he wore on Selma's Bloody Sunday, to symbolize the "many young people (who) have been a catalyst for change in the world." Still, for some it was the elder Lewis' steadfast perseverance, his decades-long instinct "to be vigilant, but stubbornly hopeful," that was most inspiring. In an interview a scant month before his death, Lewis recalled his long, righteous struggle to create "what we called the loving community...to redeem the soul of America," arguing even through Trumpian times, "We all live in the same house." Now he will grace the heart of Decatur, a reminder, as he long asserted, "There can be no turning back, there can be no giving up."
Lewis mural painted by Sean Schwab in Atlanta's Sweet Auburn neighborhood. Photo by Dean Hesse.
Nashville arrest
AP photo
Nashville arrest records unearthed from a 1963 lunch counter sit-in as chairman of SNCC. They were presented to Lewis in an emotional ceremony when he visited the city to get an award for his acclaimed autobiographical graphic novel trilogy March, which also won a 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Getty Image
Photo by Michael Avedon
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Follow John Lewis: Don't Let Trump Provoke Violence
If we want to win, we can't let Trump provoke us into violence.
Aug 02, 2020
John Lewis, the Georgia Congressman who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was one of the "Big Six" civil rights leaders who organized the 1963 March on Washington, is being remembered as one of our greatest American heroes, in large part because he was willing to risk his life in non-violent protests against white supremacy.
Lewis was arrested over 40 times in non-violent sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and protests. On March 7, 1965, his skull was fractured, and he was almost murdered, by an Alabama state trooper when he led 600 peaceful civil rights protestors on a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to demand voting rights.
Lewis and the other nonviolent protestors were brutally attacked by mounted police armed with clubs, whips, and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire as they peacefully tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
The violent images of this horrendous, unprovoked police brutality against peaceful protestors were broadcast on the national network news that night to over 60 million viewers, and outraged much of the nation. The images, when broadcast worldwide, also publicly shamed the United States on the world stage.
Lewis and the other protestors would have been within their moral rights to have returned the next day armed with rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and even firearms to protect themselves from such police brutality. But whether or not one is a pacifist, to have responded to force with force would have been political disaster for the civil rights movement.
Instead, Rev. Martin Luther King returned to Selma two weeks later to complete the march for voting rights that Lewis had started. On March 25, King led 25,000 nonviolent protestors the steps of the State Capitol in Montgomery, where he delivered his now-famous How Long, Not Long speech:
Once more, the method of nonviolent resistance was unsheathed from its scabbard, and once again an entire community was mobilized to confront the adversary. And again the brutality of a dying order shrieks across the land. Yet, Selma, Alabama, became a shining moment in the conscience of man. If the worst in American life lurked in its dark street, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation.
These images, too, were seen across the country and around the world. Today, the brave sacrifice of Lewis and his fellow nonviolent protestors is largely credited for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, This landmark legislation, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, is the cornerstone of defending the right to vote guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, but has been eroded in recent years by the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Today, Donald Trump has opened a full frontal attack on voting rights, threatening to delay or even suspend elections. In a transparent attempt to scare suburban whites into reelecting him, Trump is doing everything in his power to provoke antiracist protestors in Portland and other cities to forsake nonviolent protest and engage in violent resistance to the heavily armed federal officers in full camouflage uniforms he has ordered into American cities.
Let's be clear: Camouflage uniforms are designed to provide disguise in jungle warfare, not to intimidate protestors on the streets of American cities. But that's exactly what Trump is using them for. Sending in unidentified, camouflage-wearing federal agents to seize peaceful protestors off the streets is straight out of the playbook of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sent "little green men"--unidentified Russian troops--to invade the Ukraine in 2014.
Sending Federal troops into American streets is Kabuki theater--reality television--by Trump. He wants to create TV images that appear to reflect urban carnage. TV footage of protestors attacking camouflage-wearing police and federal officers with Molotov cocktails, rocks, and bricks is exactly what Trump wants. (It wouldn't even surprise me if Trump has undercover agents provoking protestors to use violence.)
If we want to win, we can't let Trump provoke us into violence. We must honor John Lewis, and his hard-won victories for civil rights, by following his example of nonviolent resistance.
One can have academic arguments about whether violence is ever acceptable to fight injustice. I would personally argue that at least in the cases of the American Revolution, The Civil War, and World War II, violence was necessary. Others may differ.
But right now, violent protests would be the gift to Trump that he's begging for. Don't give it to him.
The street violence of the late 1960s was used by Republican operatives to pave the way for Richard Nixon's election as president in 1968. The implementation of the "Southern Strategy" of stoking irrational fears of Black people among poor and working-class whites to cement them to the Republican Party led right up to Trump's 2016 victory, and is still with us today.
The 1967 riots in major cities like Newark, Detroit, and Milwaukee, the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and the police riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention all contributed to Richard Nixon's narrow victory. Nixon's victory consolidated power in a white supremacist oligarchy for the next half century.
Trump is on the ropes. Don't give him the gift of violent confrontations that he's so blatantly and transparently trying to provoke to rescue his campaign.
Honor John Lewis. Meet police brutality with nonviolent resistance.
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Casket of Rep. John Lewis Carried Across Edmund Pettus Bridge 55 Years After Selma's Bloody Sunday
"An incredibly moving and fitting tribute for John Lewis, a man who carried the baton of justice until the very end."
Jul 26, 2020
The casket of Congressman John Lewis, who died on July 17 following a battle with pancreatic cancer, was carried across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Sunday 55 years after the Georgia Democrat led a civil rights protest march and was beaten by Alabama state troopers in an event that has since been known as Bloody Sunday.
Lewis's final journey across the bridge by horse-drawn caisson followed a service at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma and came before the late civil rights icon will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol next week. The Washington Post reported Thursday that "only a smaller, invitation-only group will be allowed inside the building on Monday afternoon for a ceremony under the Capitol Rotunda. Lewis's casket will then be moved to the top of the steps at the East Front of the Capitol for public viewing."
The Sunday service and bridge crossing, which was live-streamed and drew a crowd, elicited a fresh wave of tributes honoring Lewis's legacy. In a tweet Sunday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) called the crossing "an incredibly moving and fitting tribute for John Lewis, a man who carried the baton of justice until the very end."
Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., on Sunday shared a recent personal memory of Lewis, writing on Twitter that "when I visited Uncle John a week before he died, I looked in his eyes and said, 'Well done.' I told him that I loved him and that we are going to continue to fight. So I must mourn and move at the same time."
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay wondered: "When Alabama state troopers beat and bloodied him on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, could a young John Lewis ever have imagined this day? That he'd live to be 80. That he'd be a lawmaker for decades. That his remains would cross the bridge again, this time lined with roses."
The rose petals on the bridge represented the blood spilled on March 7, 1965, when state troopers attacked Lewis--then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--and his fellow marchers with billy clubs and tear gas. Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull, later said, "I thought I was going to die on that bridge."
Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, expressed hope that the bridge will soon bear Lewis's name.
The bridge is currently named for a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader. In the years after Bloody Sunday, Lewis led subsequent marches across the bridge, including earlier this year. Since his death in mid-July, calls have mounted for the bridge to be renamed to honor Lewis.
As the Post's reporting on the John Lewis Bridge Project explained Sunday:
There are two petitions now, on Change.org and the project's website, that have picked up steam since Lewis's death. As of Saturday, about 715,000 people had signed them, including Selma director Ava DuVernay, Kerry Washington, Paul McCartney, Dan Rather and Pettus' great-great-granddaughter, Caroline Randall Williams, who is black.
DuVernay tweeted: "Edmund Pettus Bridge should be the John Lewis Bridge. Named for a hero. Not a murderer. Join this call. It's past due." The Rev. Jesse Jackson has also voiced support for the renaming. A separate fundraising campaign is being hosted by ActBlue, an organization that raises money for liberal grass-roots causes.
When Lewis walked across the bridge with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in March, he told a crowd that had gathered that "it is good to be in Selma, Alabama, one more time... To take a little walk to try to dramatize the need for the rights of all our people to be able to participate in the democratic process."
In 1965, public outrage over televised footage of the brutality endured by civil rights activists on Bloody Sunday helped push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act within months. Journalist Ari Berman, who has written extensively about voting rights in the United States, took to Twitter Sunday to call out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for holding up a vote on a bill to restore the landmark law.
Concerns about voting rights have grown this year in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and President Donald Trump's baseless attacks on vote-by-mail.
"The biggest issue is we have an election in the middle of a health crisis and we haven't put adequate resources into dealing with that," Cliff Albright, a Georgia activist who co-founded Black Voters Matter, told USA Today Saturday. "From where I stand, it's almost like we're fighting similar issues that John Lewis and his friends fought."
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John Lewis, a Founding Father of American Democracy
John Lewis was a leader, but more workhorse than show horse. Show horses preen to win the applause of the crowd. Workhorses pull the wagon.
Jul 21, 2020
When John Lewis left us, editorials and columns paid tribute to his leadership, his courage, his moral example. The praise was well deserved. A broader context helps understand his true contribution.
John Lewis was born one of 10 children of a sharecropper in Troy, Alabama. He should be remembered now as one of the founding fathers of American democracy. When he led that famous march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, America was not yet a full democracy.
At Selma, John Lewis walked with amazing courage into mounted police blocking the way. He was beaten badly in the police riot that followed, fearing for his very life. That scene outraged a nation.
Yes, a brutal civil war had been fought to end the scourge of slavery. Nearly a century later, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board that segregation -- legal apartheid -- was a violation of the Constitution. Yet, in 1965, Blacks still had no right to vote. Their efforts to register and vote were routinely suppressed, often violently throughout the South. The same was true for Latinos, for Asian Americans. Young people could serve in the military but had no right to vote.
At Selma, John Lewis walked with amazing courage into mounted police blocking the way. He was beaten badly in the police riot that followed, fearing for his very life. That scene outraged a nation. Two weeks later, Lyndon Johnson pledged that "We shall overcome" and introduced what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into Congress. That Act outlawed discrimination in the right to vote by race, color, or language minority status. After that Act, young people received the right to vote. Women's rights were expanded. Full American democracy was born.
John Lewis was a true hero, but he did not act alone. As he would always teach, he found his place in the civil rights movement that had been building when he was a young child. Thurgood Marshall spearheaded the legal strategy that ended with the Brown decision in the Supreme Court. Rosa Parks sat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested for ignoring white-only rules. Her courage and sacrifice drew Dr. Martin Luther King to the struggle in Montgomery. King's organizing drew the attention of a young John Lewis in Troy, Alabama.
John Lewis was a leader, but he was more workhorse than show horse. Show horses preen to win the blue ribbon and the applause of the crowd. Workhorses pull the wagon -- and get the job done. John Lewis with his quiet courage and his forceful moral vision pulled people with him. Elected to Congress, he put the Congress on his shoulders and tried by example and by organizing to make it better.
He never stopped. He took joy in how far we had come. There was a direct line from that horrible Bloody Sunday in Selma to the election of an African American president. Yet he knew we still have a long way to go.
No longer do we face separate and unequal public facilities. Our right to vote is clear, even if efforts to suppress it continue. But the final chapter of the civil rights movement -- the effort to achieve economic justice -- has been frustrated. Today economic inequality is as great as it was 60 years ago. We witness the structural racism that ends with African Americans three times more likely than whites to be infected by the pandemic and two times more likely to die. We witness the entrenched discrimination that ends in the police killing of George Floyd and many others.
That's why the extraordinary, unprecedented outpouring of protests for Black lives is so important. John has left us, but millions have picked up the baton that he once carried -- focused now on equal justice under the law, and on ending the structural racism that makes racial inequality a pre-existing condition. May John's example -- his courage, his devotion of nonviolence and to a lifetime of making "good trouble" -- help inform that struggle as it goes forward.
The democracy of 1787, where only white male landowners could vote, referencing Blacks as three-fifths human, without regard for working class whites and women, was very incomplete -- it has no export value in the world today. But the democracy of 1965, where Blacks can vote, white women can vote and serve on juries, Latinos and native Americans, 18 year olds, can vote on college campuses, that SELMA democracy is the envy of the world.
Let us cherish it.
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2020 Is Not 1968, But It Could Be
If we are to reach another new frontier, we may have to rely on each other—a remarkable 'ask' in the time of Covid-19, but one that many people, young and old, seem to be answering.
Jun 14, 2020
Opinion pieces recently have been comparing and contrasting what is going on in the year 2020 with what Americans went through in 1968. One such piece in the Washington Post focused on riots, pandemics, and the law-and-order theme in presidential campaigns. Others have focused on causally unrelated events: each year had a viral health crisis, influenza in 1968, Covid-19 in 2020; and each had a landmark space mission.
We want to focus on events relating to the continuing racial problems in our country. 2020 and 1968 look alike, but they are not. The extreme racial violence leading into 1968 was different in at least three ways.
Although most of the victims of racist violence in 1968 were African Americans, some were young white men and women. They risked and gave their lives working for racial justice.
First, although most of the victims of racist violence in 1968 were African Americans, some were young white men and women. They risked and gave their lives working for racial justice. Their deaths horrified, shamed, and disturbed the consciences of white Americans, old and young, except in places where deeply rooted racism was the longstanding way of life for white citizens.
Andrew Goodman (20 years old) and Michael Schwerner (24) from New York City worked alongside African American James Chaney (21) of Meridian, Mississippi for the Congress of Racial Equality. They were abducted, shot point-blank, and buried like animals in an earthen dam (June 21, 1964) near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Thirty-eight-year-old James Reeb was a white protestant minister with a wife and four children. He was committed to the idea that "you cannot make a difference for African-Americans while living comfortable in a white community." In early March, 1965, as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he left his family at home in predominantly African American Roxbury, Massachusetts and went to Selma, Alabama in order to join the protest marches. He was clubbed to death while walking with two other white clergymen back to their lodgings outside the 'negro' area of Selma (March 9, 1965). Rev. Clark Olsen, who survived this brutal attack, recalls hearing the three of them called "n- lovers" and then the sickening thud of the wooden club smashing Reeb's skull.
Viola Luizzo, age 39, had grown up in extreme poverty in Georgia and Tennessee and felt profound sympathies for African Americans living as 'slaves by another name' in the Jim Crow South. She felt called to leave her husband and five children to travel from Detroit, Michigan to Selma, Alabama in March 1965. She was shot twice in the head by members of the Ku Klux Klan while shuttling marchers and volunteers by car from Montgomery to Selma.
Second, prominent leaders in the national government and civil rights organizations were themselves relatively young and deeply committed to ending racism. In fact, we are writing this piece on the anniversary (June 11, 1963) of President John F. Kennedy's televised address to the nation explaining what civil rights are and why southern universities needed to be integrated.
Those who led us as a people had experience, real and vicarious, of the brutality of war and the inhumanity of poverty and prejudice. Martin Luther King, Jr. who had begun working for civil rights when he was 25, was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968 in the prime of his life. Medgar Evers, a WWII veteran, a lawyer and tireless state field secretary of the NAACP, was murdered in his driveway by rifle fire by a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson, Mississippi on June 12, 1963. Evers was 37.
John F. Kennedy, a war veteran with an understanding of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy were 46 and 43 respectively when they were murdered by gunfire. The Kennedys were children of privilege and elite education, but they came to know, as James Brown would put it, "what it is and what it is."
JFK had introduced civil rights legislation in Congress in April 1963 and RFK, as attorney general, had sent 400 federal marshals to Montgomery, Alabama in May 1961 to protect MLK and other civil rights activists. On May 24, 1963, RFK, while attorney general, held a small informal gathering on race relations with a dozen prominent African Americans including author James Baldwin and singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne. Jerome Smith, a Freedom Rider who had been jailed and beaten in Mississippi, came along. Smith did not mince words. He described being arrested and beaten while Justice Department officials stood by and took notes. RFK's conversion was not instantaneous like Saul's on the road to Damascus. But he eventually grasped the day-to-day realities of racism and acted to stop racism.
With Vietnam a constant public issue, RFK could declare, "How long can we say to a Negro in Jackson, 'When war comes you will be an American citizen, but in the meantime you're a citizen of Mississippi--and we can't help you'?"
The third major difference was the Vietnam War and the draft. Phase 1 of the Tet Offensive and the prolonged siege of U.S. Marines at Khe Sanh from January to July 1968 were determining factors in turning public opinion against the war. With Vietnam a constant public issue, RFK could declare, "How long can we say to a Negro in Jackson, 'When war comes you will be an American citizen, but in the meantime you're a citizen of Mississippi--and we can't help you'?" The universal draft exposed every young American coming of age to mortal danger. It made many families think about Saigon and Khe Sanh and about Jackson and Selma and Montgomery at the same time.
The contrast with 2020 is clear. Right now, we have neither a critical mass of mainstream Americans nor young dedicated leaders in political office who feel deeply enough about what is going on to do more than debate the acceptable boundaries of police use of force and how to keep targeted minorities from responding to acts of violence with violence. On the positive side, Rev. Al Sharpton sees reason for hope in the racial and gender diversity of the protesters at recent peaceful demonstrations. If we are to reach another new frontier, we may have to rely on each other--a remarkable 'ask' in the time of Covid-19, but one that many people, young and old, seem to be answering. We can draw upon models of moral courage and moral leadership in the 1960s.
We have martyred victims in 2020 who are calling us to do more than demonstrate. 2020 is not 1968, but it could be.
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Selma, the Birthplace of Modern Democracy in America
Selma helped secure the right to vote for African Americans and the young, and for providing the foundation for future battles for equality, including the equal rights of women
Mar 04, 2019
This past weekend, political leaders from across the country gathered in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate "Bloody Sunday," the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where peaceful demonstrators, attempting to cross the bridge, were violently driven back by Alabama State Troopers, Dallas County Sheriff's deputies and a horse-mounted posse wielding billy clubs and water hoses to savage the crowd.
The horrors played on TV sets across the country generated a national outrage that provided the final impetus for passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In many ways, Selma is the birthplace of modern democracy in America, helping to secure the right to vote for African Americans and the young, and for providing the foundation for future battles for equality, including the equal rights of women.
When former Alabama Gov. George Wallace was ill late in his life, I joined him for prayer. I asked him why he unleashed the troopers on the demonstrators in 1965. He said, "I did them a favor."
Wallace argued that the mob would have been much worse on the peaceful marchers. He never even considered that he might have used the troopers to protect them from the mob. That was a mentality that, as Dr. Martin Luther King taught, could only be challenged by nonviolent protest that demonstrated our humanity while demanding our rights.
Democrats should see Selma and rural America as both an obligation and an opportunity.
In the commemorative ceremonies this year, presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, as well as Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were joined by many legislators and political leaders. They sensibly called on participants to rise up again to challenge the revival of systematic efforts to suppress the vote and to push back against the outrageous Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder. This decision gutted enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and opened the floodgates to a wave of discriminatory state laws meant to keep people of color from exercising their right to vote.
There are laws that now require new forms of ID, voting districts have been gerrymandered and voter rolls purged. Laws now limit early voting and polling places have been closed or move without notice, and much, much more. The brave marchers in 1965 did their part for democracy, now it is up to us to defend it and extend it.
At the same time, while Selma is the birthplace of modern democracy, it is in danger of becoming a prop. Selma is the ninth poorest small town in America and 40 percent of its residents live in poverty. It exemplifies the rural and small-town America that has been left out of the recovery.
Democrats tend to see rural America as Trump country. Trump appealed to rural voters by stoking their fears and turning them against each other, but he has come up with no plan to help them. Trump offers only hate, not hope.
The new Democratic majority in the House is in many ways the fruit of the sacrifices made at Selma and elsewhere. Democrats should see Selma and rural America as both an obligation and an opportunity. What's needed is a comprehensive rural reconstruction plan, a modern version of what Franklin D. Roosevelt did when he built the Tennessee Valley Authority and modernized the Department of Agriculture, which literally electrified rural America.
Today, the Department of Agriculture has the authority and the capacity to invest in water and sewage systems, modernize utilities, provide broadband to underserved communities, offer zero interest loans to community centers and subsidize affordable housing. What we need is a plan and a budget to get this done. House Democrats should make this a priority.
Let's honor those who sacrificed so much by repealing voter suppression laws. But let us also make Selma the birthplace of a new economic justice in rural America. Selma should be more than a symbol of past struggles; it must also become a beacon for a new hope.
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