National
5 Things About the 50th Anniversary of the Selma Marches

In this March 1965 file photo, Martin Luther King, center, leads a march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. In early 1965, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference began a series of marches as part of a push for black voting rights. (AP Photo/File)
JESSE J. HOLLAND, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” a civil rights march in which protesters were beaten, trampled and tear-gassed by police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. On March 7, 1965, marchers were walking from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, to demand an end to discriminatory practices that robbed blacks of their right to vote. It took two more attempts for marchers to successfully complete their journey. Images of the violence during the first march shocked the nation and turned up the pressure to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which helped open voter rolls to millions of Southern blacks.
Five things to know about Bloody Sunday:
___
SELMA TO MONTGOMERY
The march was conceived by James Bevel, one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s aides. After a 26-year-old black church deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson, was fatally shot by a state trooper during an earlier march in Marion, Alabama, Bevel suggested that protesters carry Jackson’s casket from Marion to the steps of the state capitol. A protest march was planned instead, and the starting point changed to Selma. That march ended in the Bloody Sunday beatings.
Afterward, King issued a call for volunteers and ministers to come to Selma for a second march. However, federal judge Frank M. Johnson had forbidden marches pending his ruling on a petition to shield marchers from police interference. To heed the judge’s order, King led protesters two days later, on Tuesday, March 9, 1965, to the Pettus bridge, where they kneeled, prayed, sang and left. King’s refusal to take the march across the bridge, where Alabama lawmen were waiting, led critics to call the second march “Turnaround Tuesday.”
Johnson ordered federal protection for the marchers, and on March 21, 1965, thousands of marchers made the 50-mile journey to Montgomery. Two other people were also killed during these protests: James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister who was beaten to death by local whites on March 11 and Viola Liuzzo, a white Michigan woman who was fatally shot by the Ku Klux Klan on March 25.
___
WHERE WAS KING?
Martin Luther King Jr. was not in Selma for the Bloody Sunday march, although he had been there before working on voting rights issues, even doing a stint in jail there. King was obliged to preach at his church in Atlanta on the day people showed up to march to Montgomery, since it was their “Men’s Day” program, former King aide Andrew Young said. Young said they heard that people were showing up to march and so he immediately headed to Selma.
He and other King aides then telephoned Atlanta to convince King not to call it off.
“We persuaded him that since there were about three hundred people there, maybe they could go ahead and march, that they weren’t going to get far, anyway,” Young said in interviews for the documentary “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1965).” ”That we had seen the state troopers and they were going to probably stop them and turn them around, or maybe they would, people would get arrested.
“So he said, ‘Well, OK, go ahead and march,’ he said, ‘but don’t you all go to jail,'” Young said.
___
SHERIFF WITH NO REGRETS
One of the most polarizing figures of the Selma movement was Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, who’d already had several confrontations with protesters before the Bloody Sunday beatings. In fact, Clark insisted that the protesters who knelt down to pray before the state troopers attacked had actually provoked the police first. “The marchers fell to the ground and as the troopers moved on to them, that was when they attacked the troopers with ice picks, and straight razors, and knives, and even broken glass,” Clark told interviewers for the same “Eyes on the Prize” documentary. “And that was when they used tear gas on them and they started retreating across the bridge at that time.”
Clark lost his next election in 1966. He ended up selling mobile homes and once was sentenced to prison for conspiring to smuggle marijuana. He died in 2007.
In a 2006 interview, Clark told the Montgomery Advertiser that he did not regret his actions in Selma. “Basically, I’d do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again,” Clark said. “I did what I thought was right to uphold the law.”
___
MALCOLM X
Malcolm X had visited Selma in the weeks leading up to Bloody Sunday to support the voting rights movement there. By the time he arrived, King was in a Selma jail for protesting voting discrimination in the South. The two had first met the year before on Capitol Hill during Senate debate of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Malcolm X shared the podium with King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Mrs. King told “Eyes on the Prize” interviewers that Malcolm X said he had changed his mind about visiting King in jail, and asked her to pass along a message.
“I didn’t come to Selma to make his job more difficult, but I thought that if the white people understood what the alternative was that they would be more inclined to listen to your husband,” she said he told her.
Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, in New York City, roughly two weeks before Bloody Sunday.
___
CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL
Congress on Tuesday authorized the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to the marchers who participated in all three Selma-to-Montgomery marches. “This nation should never forget the sacrifices those who refused to accept second-class citizenship and demanded that our nation live up to the very ideals on which it was founded.” said Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala.
The Congressional Gold Medal is Congress’s highest honor.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Activism
Oakland Post: Week of March 12 – 18, 2025
The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of March 12 – 18, 2025

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.
#NNPA BlackPress
Fighting to Keep Blackness
BlackPressUSA NEWSWIRE — Trump supporters have introduced another bill to take down the bright yellow letters of Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., in exchange for the name Liberty Plaza. D.C.

By April Ryan
As this nation observes the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, the words of President Trump reverberate. “This country will be WOKE no longer”, an emboldened Trump offered during his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night. Since then, Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell posted on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter this morning that “Elon Musk and his DOGE bros have ordered GSA to sell off the site of the historic Freedom Riders Museum in Montgomery.” Her post of little words went on to say, “This is outrageous and we will not let it stand! I am demanding an immediate reversal. Our civil rights history is not for sale!” DOGE trying to sell Freedom Rider Museum
Also, in the news today, the Associated Press is reporting they have a file of names and descriptions of more than 26,000 military images flagged for removal because of connections to women, minorities, culture, or DEI. In more attempts to downplay Blackness, a word that is interchanged with woke, Trump supporters have introduced another bill to take down the bright yellow letters of Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., in exchange for the name Liberty Plaza. D.C. Mayor Morial Bowser is allowing the name change to keep millions of federal dollars flowing there. Black Lives Matter Plaza was named in 2020 after a tense exchange between President Trump and George Floyd protesters in front of the White House. There are more reports about cuts to equity initiatives that impact HBCU students. Programs that recruited top HBCU students into the military and the pipeline for Department of Defense contracts have been canceled.
Meanwhile, Democrats are pushing back against this second-term Trump administration’s anti-DEI and Anti-woke message. In the wake of the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, several Congressional Black Caucus leaders are reintroducing the Voting Rights Act. South Carolina Democratic Congressman James Clyburn and Alabama Congresswoman Terry Sewell are sponsoring H.R. 14, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Six decades ago, Lewis was hit with a billy club by police as he marched for the right to vote for African Americans. The right for Black people to vote became law with the 1965 Voting Rights Act that has since been gutted, leaving the nation to vote without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. Reflecting on the late Congressman Lewis, March 1, 2020, a few months before his death, Lewis said, “We need more than ever in these times many more someones to make good trouble- to make their own dent in the wall of injustice.”
Activism
Oakland Post: Week of March 5 – 11, 2025
The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of March 5 – 11, 2025

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.
-
#NNPA BlackPress2 weeks ago
Target Takes a Hit: $12.4 Billion Wiped Out as Boycotts Grow
-
Activism4 weeks ago
U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Lateefah Simon to Speak at Elihu Harris Lecture Series
-
Alameda County4 weeks ago
After Years of Working Remotely, Oakland Requires All City Employees to Return to Office by April 7
-
Activism4 weeks ago
Actor, Philanthropist Blair Underwood Visits Bay Area, Kicks Off Literacy Program in ‘New Oakland’ Initiative
-
Activism4 weeks ago
Lawsuit Accuses UC Schools of Giving Preference to Black and Hispanic Students
-
Alameda County4 weeks ago
Lee Releases Strong Statement on Integrity and Ethics in Government
-
Activism4 weeks ago
Retired Bay Area Journalist Finds Success in Paris with Black History Tours
-
Activism2 weeks ago
Undocumented Workers Are Struggling to Feed Themselves. Slashed Budgets and New Immigration Policies Bring Fresh Challenges