By Kim Chandler and Safiyah Riddle
Selma, ala. (AP) – Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights walking between the pairs through the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965.
The walkers protest against the refusal of white officials to authorize black Alabamians to register for the vote, as well as the days of murder earlier by Jimmie Lee Jackson, a minister and organizer of voting rights who was shot dead by a nearby Marion soldier.
At the top of the span above the Alabama river, they saw what awaited them: a line of state soldiers, deputies and men on horseback. After their approach, the police had dispersion warned and then triggered violence.
“In about a minute or a half, they took their clubs from Billy, holding it at both ends, began to push us away from us, then they started beat men, women and children, and tear gas, women and children, and men of cattle, women and children vicially,” said Mauldin, who was 17 years old at the time.
Selma marked the 60th anniversary of the confrontation that became known on Sunday on Sunday. The attack shocked the nation and galvanized the support of the American law on the voting rights of 1965. The annual commemoration paid tribute to those who fought to guarantee the voting rights for black Americans and have brought calls to make fun of the struggle for equality.
For the feet soldiers of the movement, the celebration comes in the midst of concerns about the new voting restrictions and the efforts of the Trump administration to redo federal agencies which, according to them
“This country was not a democracy for blacks until it happens,” said Mauldin about voting rights. “And we are still constantly fighting to make it a more concrete reality for ourselves.”
Speaking during the Chair of the City’s historic Baptist Church, the site of the first mass meeting of the voting rights, the head of the Hakeem Chamber Jeffries said that what had happened in Selma changed the nation. But he said that the 60th birthday arrives at a time when there were “problems all around” and some “want to whiten our history”. But he said that as the walkers of Bloody Sunday, they must continue.
“Right now, faced with trouble on each side, we have to continue,” Jeffries told the crowd that included Reverend Jesse Jackson, several members of the Congress and others gathered for the commemoration.
The American representative Terwell of Alabama said they gathered in Selma for the 60th anniversary “at a time when the vote was in danger”.
Sewell noted that the number of voting restrictions presented since the United States Supreme Court has effectively abolished a key element of the law on voting rights which required courts with a history of racial discrimination to the new laws on pre-clairing vote with the Ministry of Justice with the Ministry of Justice
Sewell this week has reintroduced legislation to restore the requirement. The proposal has repeatedly stopped at Congress. The legislation is called John Lewis, the late Congress of Georgia who was at the top of the bloody Sunday March.
The annual celebration will end with a ceremony and will walk through the Edmund Pettus bridge. At the time, the Bloody Sunday Marchers walked in pairs through the Selma bridge. Mauldin was in the third pair of the line led by Lewis and Hosea Williams.
“We had accelerated our nerves to a point where we were so determined that we were ready to face. It was the past being courageous. We were determined and we were indignant, ”said Mauldin in an interview with the Associated Press.
Mauldin, who brought to his head, said he thought that police officers were trying to encourage a riot as they attacked walkers.
Kirk Carrington was only 13 years old blood on Sunday. As violence bursts, a white man on a horse branding a stick chased him to social housing projects where his family lived.
Carrington said he started walking after witnessing his father to depreciate with his white employers when his father returned from the service during the Second World War. Standing at Tabernacle Baptist Church where he was trained in non -violent protest tactics 60 years earlier, he was in tears by thinking about what the inhabitants of his city have achieved.
“When we started walking, we did not know the impact we would have in America. We knew after having aged and grew up that the impact he had not only in Selma, but on the impact he had around the world, “said Carrington.
Dr. Verdell Lett Dawson, who grew up in Selma, remembers an era when she had to lower her gaze if she passed a white person in the street to avoid establishing visual contact.
Dawson and Mauldin said they were concerned about the potential dismantling of the Ministry of Education and other changes to federal agencies. Trump prompted to end the diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government.
The support of the federal government “is to know how black Americans were able to obtain justice, to obtain a semblance of equality, because the rights of the States, it will be the white majority that will reign,” said Dawson.
“Whether it’s a tragedy of 60 years later: what we are looking at now is a return in the 1950s,” said Dawson.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
