Selma, Ala. (AP) – Charles Mauldin was on March 7, 1965 near the front of a series of voting marchers who walk on foot in pairs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama.
The demonstrators protested against the refusal of the white officials to enable black Alabamians Jimmie Lee JacksonA minister and voting right organizer who was shot by a state troops in nearby Marion.
At the top of the span over the Alabama river, they saw what was waiting for them: a number of state troops, MPs and men on horseback. After they had turned, law enforcement warned a warning to disperse and then release violence.
“Within about one or half, they took their Billy clubs with them, held on to both ends, push us back to push us back, and then they began to beat men, women and children and men, women and children and cattle products, women and children cheap,” said Mauldin, who was 17 years elderly.
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File – tear gas clouds fill the air as state troops ordered by governor George Wallace, a demonstration march in Selma, Ala., March 7, 1965, about what became known as “bloody Sunday”. (AP photo, file) -
File – Amelia Boynton is supported by humans after being injured when the state police on March 7, 1965 a demonstration march in Selma, Ala. (AP photo, file) -
File – Selma Civil Rights Foot Soldier Charles Maudin presents President Joe Biden to near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. (AP Photo/Julie Bennett, file) -
File – A soldier of the state of Alabama is swinging a club in John Lewis, right -wing foreground, chairman of the student nonviolent coordination committee to separate a civil rights march in Selma, Ala., March 7, 1965. (AP photo, file)
Selma was on Sunday on the 60th anniversary of the collision, which became known as Bloody Sunday. The attack shocked the nation and the support of the US voting law law of 1965. The annual commemoration paid homage to those who fought to secure the voting rights for black Americans, and brought calls to the struggle for equality.
For foot soldiers of the movement, the celebration comes in the middle of concerns regarding New restrictions on coordination And the efforts of the Trump government, federal authorities, of which they said they made America a democracy for everyone
“This country was not a democracy for black ones until this happened,” said Mauldin about voting rights. “And we are still struggling to make it a concrete reality for ourselves.”
The nation changed the nation on the pulpit of the historical pen -tank -Baptist Church of the city and the first mass assembly of the voting right movement, the house of the minority of the house, what happened in Selma. But he said the 60th anniversary comes at a time when there is “problems” everywhere and want to “wash our history”. But he said, like the marching of the bloody Sunday, they have to continue.
“At that moment we have to stand on every side with anger,” said Jeffries to the crowd to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, several members of the congress and others to commemorate.
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The US MP Terri Sewell from Alabama said they gathered in Selma on the 60th anniversary, “at a time when the vote is in danger.”
Sewell found that the number of voting restrictions that have been introduced since the Supreme Court of the United States
Sewell reintroduced legislation this week to restore the requirements. The proposal has repeatedly stalled in the congress. The legislation is named after John Lewis, the slow Member of the Congress of Georgia, who was in March the leadership of the bloody Sunday.
The annual celebration ends with a ceremony and march through the Edmund Pettus Bridge. At that time, the bloody Sunday marchers walked through the Selma bridge in pairs. Maudin was in the third pair of the line under the direction of Lewis and Hosea Williams.
“We had strengthened our nerves to a point where we were so determined that we were ready to face. It was over to be brave. We were determined and we were outraged, ”Maudin recalled in an interview with the Associated Press.
Mauldin, who turned a blow on the head, said that he believed that law enforcement officers tried to lead an uprising when they attacked demonstrators.
Kirk Carrington was only 13 years elderly on the bloody Sunday. When violence broke out, a white man followed him on a horse who had a stick and followed him to the public residential projects in which his family lived.
Carrington said he started marching after seeing his father reduced his white employers when his father returned from duty in the Second World War. He stood in the Baptistenkirche Abbey Hut, where he was trained in violent protest tactics 60 years earlier, and thought about tears and thought about what the people of his city had achieved.
“When we started marching, we didn’t know what effects we had in America. We knew after we got older and grown that the effects not only had in Selma, but the effects on the whole world, ”said Carrington.
Dr. Verdell Lett Dawson, who grew up in Selma, remembers a time when she was expected to reduce her gaze when she came by a white person on the street to avoid an eye contact.
Dawson and Maudin said they were concerned about the potential dismantling of the Ministry of Education And other changes to federal authorities. Trump has pushed to end Diversity, justice and inclusion Programs within the federal government.
The support of the Federal Government is “how black Americans get justice and have a certain appearance of equality because it is up to the rights of the states that it will be the white majority that will rule,” said Dawson.
“This is a tragedy of 60 years later: what we look at now is a return to the 1950s,” said Dawson.
