By Marian Wright Edelman
Sixty years ago, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams set out on a nonviolent march with a group of 600 men, women, young people, and children headed from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital in Montgomery. They were seeking the right to vote and protesting the tragic death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black church deacon and military veteran who had died February 26 from injuries he received eight days earlier when he, his mother, sister, and 82-year-old grandfather attended a nonviolent voting rights demonstration that was attacked by law enforcement officials. Jackson was beaten and shot by an Alabama state trooper while trying to shield his mother from a police nightstick. As the marchers left Selma’s Brown Chapel AME Church on the morning of March 7 and headed to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were also immediately met by lawless state and local law enforcement officials and brutally attacked. The televised images of “Bloody Sunday” and the savage beatings of the marchers—including John Lewis, whose skull was fractured—were a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement and in America’s struggle to become America.
Two weeks later, I traveled from Mississippi to Alabama to join John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and about 25,000 fellow citizens to walk the 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery and complete that March. This time we were safer thanks to Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.’s order that we had a right to peaceful protest, and with National Guard protection. And we were buoyed by President Johnson’s March 15th Special Message to a Joint Session of Congress, “The American Promise,” calling on Congress to pass what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In that speech President Johnson said: “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal’—‘government by consent of the governed’—‘give me liberty or give me death’. . . Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man.” He continued: “To apply any other test—to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth—is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.” He said on the “issue of equal rights,” “should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.” The address is a profound contrast to the message of today’s President.
As Dr. King spoke to the crowd at the end of the exhilarating Selma to Montgomery March, like President Johnson, he reminded us that the work was not yet done. Dr. King said: “Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past . . . Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat . . . Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”
Sixty years later, instead of making sure no child’s hopes will be denied in America because of color, race, religion, or place of birth, the same categories and more are being used in new ways to try to erase and exclude. Racial inequities in education, housing, and other measures still loom large, but face new prohibitions on attempts to acknowledge them, study them, or correct them. Voting rights remain under attack, and voting rights protections, including those created in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, have continued to be weakened. And we remain in desperate need of more leaders who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. But the courage that propelled the Selma marchers forward in the face of brutal systemic resistance must keep pushing all Americans closer to the day our nation finally realizes President Johnson’s American promise and Dr. King’s American dream.