'Bloody Sunday' 60th anniversary marked in Selma with remembrances and
concerns about the future
[March 10, 2025]
By KIM CHANDLER and SAFIYAH RIDDLE
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. They kept
going. After they approached, law enforcement gave a two-minute 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.
Selma on Sunday marked 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 brought calls to recommit to the fight for equality.
For those gathered in Selma, 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
Speaking at the pulpit of the city’s historic Tabernacle Baptist Church,
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said what happened in Selma
changed the nation. He said the 60th anniversary comes at a time when
there is “trouble all around” and some “want to whitewash our history.”
But he said like the marchers of Bloody Sunday, they must keep going.
“At this moment, faced with trouble on every side, we’ve got to press
on,” Jeffries said to the crowd that included the Rev. Jesse Jackson,
multiple members of Congress and others gathered for the commemoration.
Members of Congress joined with Bloody Sunday marchers to lead a march
of several thousand people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They stopped
to pray at the site where marchers were beaten in 1965.
“We gather here on the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday when our
country is in chaos,” said U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama.
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U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.,
Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson and NAACP President Derick
Johnson, from left, march across the Edmund Pettus bridge during the
60th anniversary of the march to ensure that African Americans could
exercise their constitutional right to vote, Sunday, March 9, 2025,
in Selma, Ala. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Sewell, a Selma native, noted the number of voting restrictions
introduced since the U.S. Supreme Court effectively abolished a key
part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a
history of racial discrimination to clear new voting laws with the
Justice Department. Other speakers noted the Trump administration's
push to end diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and a rollback
of equal opportunity executive orders that have been on the books
since the 1960s.
In 1965, the Bloody Sunday marchers led by John Lewis and Hosea
Williams walked in pairs across the Selma bridge headed toward
Montgomery.
“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.
He said the “country was not a democracy for Black folks” until
voting rights. "And we’re still constantly fighting to make that a
more concrete reality for ourselves.”
Kirk Carrington was just 13 on Bloody Sunday and was chased through
the city by a man on a horse wielding a stick. “When we started
marching, we did not know the impact we would have in America," he
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 Mauldin said they are concerned about the potential
dismantling of the Department of Education and other changes to
federal agencies.
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.
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