This is a side bar to "Thousands march to honor the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday."
SELMA, ALABAMA – When the Bloody Sunday foot soldiers faced violence while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, they were marching for the right to vote. Sunday, as thousands crossed that same bridge, still named after a KKK leader, participants continued the fight for equal justice.
People from all over the country chanted and carried political signs calling for voter protections. Many said they were marching in protest of orders from the Trump Administration that had closed civil rights offices, cut back DEI programs and listed historic sites in Montgomery, Alabama, for sale – including the Greyhound Bus Station which houses the Freedom Riders Museum.
One sign read, “This is God’s World, NOT Trump’s.”
Among the marchers was Margaret Huang, who is the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Montgomery founded to ensure government agencies complied with civil rights laws.
“We're here to say that the South is ready to lead the fight for civil rights again,” Huang said. “When you think about the crossers of the bridge 60 years ago, they were fighting a government that didn't care about equal justice.
“Today, we are seeing some of that same repetition. We have to be like the foot soldiers in Selma. We have to be willing to take up this fight ourselves and to walk across that bridge.”
Miss Teen Selma Jubilee is Abriel Goulding, an 18-year-old from Leroy, Alabama. Goulding was marching against DEI cuts, which she said resulted in products from her mother’s hair business being removed from Walmart’s shelves.
“It's been very tragic for our family, but I want to just help and hopefully advocate, so we can erase this,” Goulding said.
Rose Smith traveled from Atlanta to march.
“We’re fighting for the same thing we were fighting for 60 years ago,” Smith said. “My ancestors were here before me; they paved the way for me to be here, and I hear them crying from the grave: ‘you belong here.’”
The bridge crossing concluded with remarks from Alabama’s newest congressional representative, Shomari Figures. He had a message for fellow Democrats.
“We cannot let individual disagreements or disagreements on individual issues continue to be a foundational principle that judges how you vote,” Figures said. “We got to stick together because, say whatever you want to about the Republicans and Donald Trump, you cannot call them not unified.”
Listen to Emily Mosier's radio-version of this story, which first played on NPR's Morning Edition, here: https://soundcloud.com/troypublicradio/250310npr1
Emily Mosier photos
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