SELMA, Ala. (AP) — Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights marchers walking in pairs across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.
The marchers were protesting white officials’ refusal to allow Black Alabamians to register to vote, as well as the killing days earlier of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a minister and voting rights organizer who was shot by a state trooper in nearby Marion.
At the apex of the span over the Alabama River, they saw what awaited them: a line of state troopers, deputies and men on horseback. After they approached, law enforcement gave a warning to disperse and then unleashed violence.
“Within about a minute or a half, they took their billy clubs, holding it on both ends, began to push us back to back us in, and then they began to beat men, women and children, and tear gas men, women and children, and cattle prod men, women and children viciously,” said Mauldin, who was 17 at the time.
Alabama this weekend is marking the 60th anniversary of the clash that became known as Bloody Sunday. The attack shocked the nation and galvanized support for the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965. The annual commemoration pays homage to those who fought to secure voting rights for Black Americans and each year brings calls to recommit to the fight for equality.
For foot soldiers of the movement, the celebration comes amid concerns about new voting restrictions and the Trump administration’s effort to remake federal agencies they said helped make America a democracy for all
“This country was not a democracy for Black folks until that happened,” Mauldin said of voting rights. “And we’re still constantly fighting to make that a more concrete reality for ourselves.”
U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama this week reintroduced legislation to restore a VRA requirement for jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear new voting laws with the Justice Department. The legislation is named for John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman who was at the lead of the Bloody Sunday march.
“It is clear that the values that guided John Lewis and those foot soldiers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge are under attack every day. We see new efforts to roll back our progress and to make it harder for Americans to vote,” Sewell said.
The bill has stalled repeatedly in Congress as opponents argue such measures are no longer needed because the country has changed since the 1960s.
The Bloody Sunday marchers walked in pairs across the Selma bridge. Mauldin was in the third pair of the line led by Lewis and Hosea Williams.
“We had steeled our nerves to a point where we were so determined that we were willing to confront. It was past being courageous. We were determined, and we were indignant,” Mauldin recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.
Mauldin, who took a blow to the head, said he believes law enforcement officers were trying to incite a riot as they attacked marchers.
Kirk Carrington was just 13 on Bloody Sunday. As the violence erupted, a white man on a horse wielding a stick a chased him all the way back to the public housing projects where his family lived.
Carrington said he started marching after witnessing his father get belittled by his white employers when his father returned from service in World War II. Standing in Tabernacle Baptist Church where he was trained in non-violent protest tactics 60 years earlier, he was brought to tears thinking about what the people of his city achieved.
“When we started marching, we did not know the impact we would have in America. We knew after we got older and got grown that the impact it not only had in Selma, but the impact it had in the entire world,” Carrington said.
Dr. Verdell Lett Dawson, who grew up in Selma, remembers a time when she was expected to lower her gaze if she passed a white person on the street to avoid making eye contact.
Dawson and Maudlin said they are concerned about the potential dismantling of the Department of Education and other changes to federal agencies. Trump has pushed to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government.
Support from the federal government “is how Black Americans have been able to get justice, to get some semblance of equality, because left to states’ rights, it is going to be the white majority that’s going to rule,” Dawson said.
“That that’s a tragedy of 60 years later: what we are looking at now is a return to the 1950s,” Dawson said.
