"Bloody Sunday" 60 years from Selma, with memories and concerns about the future

Selma, ala. (AP) – Charles Mauldin was in front of a line of voting rights that walk in pairs on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965.

The marches protested about the refusal of white officials to allow black alabam to register to vote as well as the days of killing earlier in Jimmie Lee JacksonA minister and organizer for voting rights, who was shot by a nearby Marion state soldier.

At the top of the interval on the Alabama river, they saw what was waiting for them: a line of state troops, deputies and men at horseback. After they approached, law enforcement gave a warning to disperse and then unleash violence.

“In about a minute or a half, they took the Billy clubs, holding it on both ends, they started pushing us back, and then they started to beat men, women and men with tear gas, women and children, and for men, women and children,” Mauldin said.

Alabama this weekend marks the 60th anniversary of Clash who became known as Bloody Sunday. The attack shocked the nation and galvanized the support for the US voting rights in 1965. Annual commemoration pays tribute to those who fought to ensure voting rights for black Americans and every year brings calls to recommend the equality fight.

For the leg soldiers of the movement, the feast comes against the background of concerns about new voting restrictions and Trump administration effort to restore federal agencies they said has helped America to be a democracy for all

“This country was not a democracy for black people until this happened,” Mauldin said about voting rights. “And we are still constantly fighting to make this a more concrete reality for ourselves.”

Republic of USA Terri Sewell in Alabama this week reintroduced the legislation to restore an VRA requirement For jurisdictions with a historian of racial discrimination in new pre-class laws with the justice department. The legislation is named for John Lewis, The The regretted congressist in Georgia which was in the bloody forehead on Sunday.

“It is clear that the values that guided John Lewis and those foot soldiers on the Edmund Pettus bridge are attacked every day. We see new efforts to return our progress and make it harder for Americans to vote, ”said Sewell.

The draft law has repeatedly stopped in Congress, because opponents claim that such measures are no longer necessary, because the country has changed since the 1960s.

Bloody Sunday Marchers were walking in pairs along the Selma bridge. Mauldin was in the third pair of the line led by Lewis and Hosea Williams.

“We have vocated our nerves to a point where we were so determined that we are willing to face. Was past to be brave. We were determined and we were outraged, “Mauldin recalled in an interview with Associated Press.

Mauldin, who took a blow to the head, said he believes that the people of the law were trying to incite a revolt as they had attacked the marches.

Kirk Carrington had only 13 bloody Sunday. While violence broke out, a white man on a horse who wore a stick, followed him to the public housing projects in which his family lived.

Carrington said he started marching after witnessing his father, was crowded by his white employers when his father returned from the Second World War. Standing in the Baptist Church Tabernacul, where he was trained in non-violent protest tactics 60 years earlier, he was brought into tears thinking about what the people in his city obtained.

“When we started to march, I didn’t know the impact we will have in America. I knew after I was old and grew that the impact it had not only in Selma, but the impact it had throughout the world, “said Carrington.

Dr. Verdell Lett Dawson, who grew up in Selma, remembers a period when he was expected to go down if a white person passes on the street to avoid contact with his eyes.

Dawson and Maudlin said they were concerned about the potential disassembly Department of Education and other changes in federal agencies. Trump pushed to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government.

The support of the federal government “is the way in which black Americans have managed to achieve justice, to achieve a certain aspect of equality, because left to the rights of the states, will be the white majority that will govern,” Dawson said.

“This is a tragedy 60 years later: what we look now is a return to the 1950s,” Dawson said.