The sun seemed hotter overhead here in Selma, heart of the farming region known as the "Alabama Black Belt," than any place yet along the civil rights trail. Here in the Black Belt, so named for its rich, dark soil, black slaves toiled in the fields for 200 years, where they fueled the baronial excess of a plantation economy.
Today, gathered under that scorching sun at the foot of the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, in a park dedicated to memorializing the voting rights struggle, African Americans came to talk about "a day that the Lord made," when the worm turned, as Selma native Lawrence Huggins aphorized. "Black slaves grew all that cotton," he said, "then at the end of the Civil War, we outnumbered them."
But for the next 100 years, blacks in the region had to wage a bloody, protracted battle to win the right to exercise the vote. No event on the American civil rights timeline is seared more into the national conscience than the occurrence at the foot of the Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.
Demonstrators, led by Martin Luther King aide Hosea Williams, and now-Georgia Congressman John Lewis, gathered on that Sunday for a march to dramatize Alabama's discriminatory voter registration policies. Topping the Pettus Bridge on Highway 80, bound for the capitol in Montgomery, the marchers were confronted by masses of state troopers and local lawmen at the edge of the city. On orders of Governor George Wallace, their mission was to stop the march. At all costs.
As soon as a dispersal order was given, tear gas canisters sailed into the crowd. "The fog cloud got bigger and bigger," recalled Huggins, one of the scores of marchers waylaid on the bridge that day. "You couldn't see and you were gasping for air."
The marchers attempted to flee back across the bridge, but Selma Sheriff Jim Clark unleashed a squad of shock troops mounted on horseback to ride into the crowd wielding nightsticks and whips.
Known as Bloody Sunday, all of the day's officially sanctioned violence was captured in network television news footage.
A second march, led by King, was also halted by state troopers. On the third march, held six days after President Lyndon Johnson sent his voting rights proposal to Congress, the march was finally completed. "People lost their fear," said Huggins, "and once they lost their fear, it was over."
Among the people who addressed today's gathering was Selma Mayor James Perkins, elected the predominantly black city's first African American mayor in 2000.
