Fifty years ago today, 600 civil rights marchers started walking east on US 80 out of Selma, Alabama. The march was led by Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The march had two goals that should sound familiar to all of us; to protest the obstacles to voting put in place by state and local officials and to protest police violence against the black community.The protest went well until they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and left Selma. There, they met a wall of troopers and “deputized” locals – County Sheriff Jim Clark had issued an order for all white males in Dallas County over the age of twenty-one to report to the courthouse that morning to be deputized. Continue reading