National

5 Things About the 50th Anniversary of the Selma Marches

Published

10 years ago

March 7, 2015

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:

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024

Published

22 hours ago

November 1, 2024

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New Filing: Trump’s Attempts to Overturn 2020 Election Were Part of Private Scheme, Not Official Acts

NNPA NEWSWIRE — The filing reveals the extent of Trump’s interactions with figures such as attorney Rudy Giuliani and other senior officials, some of whose names were withheld. Trump persisted with a plan to undercut Joe Biden’s victory despite numerous warnings from people in his circle that his claims of a stolen election were untrue.

Published

4 days ago

October 29, 2024

Oakland Post

Jack Smith during a statement regarding the indictment of Donald J. Trump. (Wikimedia Commons)

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

Special Counsel Jack Smith has delivered a powerful legal blow to former President Donald Trump, unveiling new evidence that the twice-impeached Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results were part of a private scheme rather than actions taken in his official capacity as president.

In a 165-page legal brief unsealed Wednesday, Smith provided new details about Trump’s behind-the-scenes maneuvers to subvert the election, including pressure campaigns targeting key officials, attempts to create false electors, and private discussions with his vice president, Mike Pence.

The filing reveals the extent of Trump’s interactions with figures such as attorney Rudy Giuliani and other senior officials, some of whose names were withheld. Trump persisted with a plan to undercut Joe Biden’s victory despite numerous warnings from people in his circle that his claims of a stolen election were untrue.

Smith’s brief is part of a broader strategy to prove that Trump can face trial for his actions, even after a Supreme Court ruling granted him immunity for official acts as president. The special counsel argues that Trump’s efforts to enlist Pence in blocking Congress’s certification of the election results were part of a private, illegal campaign to retain power, not part of his official duties.

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private criminal effort,” Smith wrote in the filing. “In his capacity as a candidate, he used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process.”

The document provides new evidence of Trump’s attempts to sway election officials in critical swing states to alter the results in his favor. The brief quotes a lawyer advising Trump, who gave an “honest assessment” that his claims of widespread fraud would not withstand scrutiny in court. Yet, Trump dismissed the warning. “The details don’t matter,” Trump said, according to the filing.

Further, the brief recounts private conversations between Trump and Pence, in which Pence urged Trump to accept defeat and consider another run in 2024. Trump, however, expressed reluctance, saying, “2024 is so far off.”

Smith’s filing depicts Trump’s actions as part of a desperate and illegal campaign to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. The brief also points to Trump’s reliance on Giuliani and other private allies in his election subversion attempts, asserting that none of these efforts fell under the scope of presidential duties.

“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct,” the filing reads. “Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”

A sealed appendix to the legal brief contains FBI interviews, search warrant affidavits, and grand jury testimony that might soon become public. Smith’s filing builds on the indictment released last year, expanding the evidence and reinforcing the argument that Trump’s conduct was criminal and not shielded by presidential immunity.

Smith concluded the brief with an explicit request to the court: “The government respectfully submits that the defendant’s conduct described in this motion is not subject to presidential immunity and that he should face trial for his private acts of subversion.”

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Special Interview: Rep. Barbara Lee Discusses Kamala Harris’ Plan for Black Men

On Oct. 16, California Black Media (CBM) spoke with Harris-Walz campaign surrogate, Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA-12), who shared more insights on Harris’ agenda and the importance of securing the Black Male vote. “She has said very clearly that she wants to earn the vote of everyone. And that means earning the vote of Black men,” said Lee of Harris. “She understands the systemic and historic challenges that Black men have. You haven’ t heard of a presidential candidate coming up with a concrete actual plan and policy agenda.” The agenda includes five focus areas based on insights she gleaned from hosting discussions with Black men during her Economic Opportunity Tour.

Published

5 days ago

October 28, 2024

Oakland Post

(File Photo) U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-13-Oakland) chides Justices on the Supreme Court of the United States for voting to strike down Affirmative Action. She is shown here speaking in front of the California Reparations Task Force in Oakland on May 6, 2023. CBM photo by Antonio Ray Harvey. By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

Last week, the Kamala Harris campaign released its Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.

“She has said very clearly that she wants to earn the vote of everyone. And that means earning the vote of Black men,” said Lee of Harris. “She understands the systemic and historic challenges that Black men have. You haven’ t heard of a presidential candidate coming up with a concrete actual plan and policy agenda.”

The agenda includes five focus areas based on insights she gleaned from hosting discussions with Black men during her Economic Opportunity Tour:

Provide 1 million loans that are fully forgivable to Black entrepreneurs and others disadvantaged groups to start businesses.
Champion education, training, and mentorship programs that help Black men get good-paying jobs in high-demand industries It will also develop more accessible pathways for Black men to become teachers.
Support a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected.
Launch a National Health Equity Initiative focused on Black men that addresses sickle cell disease, diabetes, mental health, prostate cancer, and other health challenges that disproportionately impact them.
Legalize recreational marijuana and creating opportunities for Black Americans to succeed in this new industry.

“[Vice President Harris] knows that Black men have long felt that too often their voice in our political process has gone unheard and that there is so much untapped ambition and leadership within the Black male community,” the language in the agenda states. “Black men and boys deserve a president who will provide the opportunity to unleash this talent and potential by removing historic barriers to wealth creation, education, employment, earnings, health, and improving the criminal justice system.”

Diving into Harris’ agenda, Lee says, reminded her of her own record of supporting Black men over the years as an elected official. In the 90’s, she established the first California Commission on African American Males through which she pressured the state to address urgent economic, health and social challenges specific to Black men.

“No group of people are a monolithic group of people,” said Lee She’ s not taking any vote for granted. I’ve known her over three decades and I believe she is being herself. She’ s authentic,” Lee added.

Each of the 5 key points addressed in the Harris Campaign’s agenda, Lee says, has additional clauses that can potentially help Black men and their families thrive. This includes lowering rent; up to $25,000 in downpayment help for first time homebuyers; and cutting taxes for Black men in lower-wage jobs by increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit maximum to $1,500.

“I think the messages is one of empowerment for Black men — regardless of whether they’ re a blue-collar worker, if they’ re not working, if they’ re in business, if they’ re an entrepreneur, whatever background or whatever they’re doing or experiencing life. I think the authenticity of their experience can only be articulated through them,” said Lee.