On the voting rights trail, bus riders to Montgomery retrace old steps
while fighting a new fight
[May 18, 2026]
By BILL BARROW
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated
for voting rights and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before
returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal
protection. Keith Odom was a toddler then.
Now 62 years old, the union man and grandfather of three retraced some
of their final steps. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina,
to Atlanta, where he joined several dozen other activists on two buses
to Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he stepped off his bus and
onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded.
“The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” said
Odom, who is Black.
His voice trailed off as he saw the Alabama Capitol and a stage that sat
roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original
march.
Odom lamented that he and his fellow bus riders were not simply
commemorating that seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead
they came to renew the fight. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to
send the Voting Rights Act to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to
sign, securing and expanding political power for Black and other
nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.
Saturday’s “All Roads Lead to the South” rally was the first mass
organizing response after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely
diminished that landmark law. Striking down a majority Black
congressional district in Louisiana, the justices concluded in a 6-3
ruling that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself
discriminatory. That spurred multiple states, including Alabama, to
redraw U.S. House districts in ways that make it harder for Black
voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect lawmakers of their
choice.
“I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom said. “I
want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”
An old political battle is new again
The passenger rosters and the scene when riders arrived in Montgomery
sounded the echoes and rhymes of past and present.
“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” said
Justice Washington, a Kennesaw State University student named because
her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. “My
grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do
mine.”
No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting
Rights Act became law. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack
Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008.
Kobe Chernushin is 18, white and just graduated high school in Atlanta’s
northern suburbs. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice
Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby, a 29-year-old executive
for the organization, doing standups for the group’s followers on social
media.
“I believe in the power of showing up,” he said.
The buses launched from the congressional district in Georgia once
represented by John Lewis, bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in
Selma, Alabama, when he was 25. Lewis died in 2020, but some on the
buses Saturday celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is
named for him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override
the U.S. Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and outlaw
the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald
Trump has instigated.
“I’m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he
was a student,” said Darrin Owens, 27. He has worked for former Vice
President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.
“Political activism is personal,” Owens said, explaining that he
attended Saturday as a citizen, not a political professional. “Sometimes
those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black
person living in a Southern state, I’m committed to action that stops
what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person who
represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not
understand me or my community.”
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Kobe Chernushin, right, records Khayla Doby for the Georgia Youth
Justice Coalition during a voting rights rally in Montgomery, Ala.,
Saturday, May 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Bill Barrow)
When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on Montgomery’s
streets. A wounded, recovering Lewis did during the second march in
1965.
This time many of the Alabama troopers and local officers who walked
the area were Black.
The buses and sandwich lunches had been arranged by Fair Fight
Action, a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat
Stacey Abrams, who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs
in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in
U.S. history. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.
Different generations share their stories
At different points, Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of
the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
“It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making
progress, then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to go
through the same battle again just to get to where we were,” said
Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is
now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta.
She stood across from the church where a young King led the
Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and not far from where Jefferson
Davis took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending
Confederate president.
Nguyen and her sister Bee, a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia
General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women
as they walked. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old
Montgomery residents who have been friends since they were in a
segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney
Lanier High School.
“I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford said, pointing at her dark
skin. “It was never real integration, and it’s not like we can ever
just blend in.”
Burton described them as being “in the second wave” of Black
students. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “And we had to support each
other.”
They remember their parents not being able to vote in the era of
poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the
Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed. But they smiled as they
swapped family histories with the Nguyens.
Burton said immigrants, descendants of enslaved persons and Native
Americans have different but overlapping paths. “We just want to be
treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the
country has promised us,” she said. “They’ve never fully lived up to
it.”
Conflicting legacies are at stake
To Odom, who had begun his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the
current U.S. Supreme Court reinforced that history by refusing to
see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair
representation, not simply the “technical right to vote.”
He recalls decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond,
a segregationist Democratic governor who became a “Dixiecrat”
presidential candidate and U.S. senator — by now as a Republican —
into the 21st century. Odom said he fears his state losing U.S. Rep.
Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus,
through redistricting.
“They want to take away that legacy when we’re still living with
Strom’s?” Odom said.
Odom said he is also worried that the young people who participated
Saturday are not a vanguard but outliers.
“I was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,” he said.
“She told me she supported me but didn’t want to do it or work for
anybody” running for office. “She wondered what any of them are
going to do for her.”
Nonetheless, he said on the way home, “I’m still going to tell her
what I saw and what I heard.”
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