The anniversary arrives as a stark warning that the right to vote, paid for in blood that day, is in peril.
Beaten and left for dead. Skulls cracked by batons. Tear gassed. Seventeen people hospitalized.
That was the carnage 60 years ago on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., when Black people marched and bled for a right guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote. Some 600 civil rights advocates — including future congressman John Lewis, then just 25 years old — set out from Selma to Montgomery to demand that the country honor that guarantee.
State troopers, local police, and White vigilantes met them with horrific violence instead.
Images of the violence on that day, known as Bloody Sunday, “made it plain and clear that hundreds, thousands, millions of people could not participate in the democratic process simply because of the color of their skin,” Lewis said in 2018.
Visual proof of that brutal assault — the blood, the broken skulls, the tear gas — shocked the nation’s conscience and catalyzed the passage of the Voting Rights Act just months later.
Now, civil rights activists and scholars warn that the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday arrives not as a celebration of voting rights but as a stark warning that the right, paid for in blood that day, is in peril.
“I think about the progress that has been made — and the threat,” Rev. Al Sharpton said about the anniversary on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on March 7.
“I marched across that bridge with the first Black president during the 50th anniversary,” Sharpton said. “Now, in the 60th anniversary, we’re facing a president that, in our judgment, is hostile to those rights.”
History made
A decade ago, President Barack Obama linked arms with Sharpton, John Lewis – now a veteran congressman – and other civil rights leaders to march across that bridge for the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
“Because of what they did, the doors of opportunity swung open not just for African Americans, but for every American,” Obama said in a historic speech on that day.
It was an electric and emotional moment, a flicker of hope for many that the nation had finally turned a corner.
But Charles Blow, then-columnist for The New York Times, felt something else.
Instead of celebration, “there seemed to me something else in the air: a lingering — or gathering — sense of sadness,” he wrote. “ frustration born out of perpetual incompletion, an anger engendered by the threat of regression, a pessimism about a present and future riven by worsening racial understanding and interplay.”
Now, 10 years later, America’s experiencing what political analyst Bakari Sellers calls President Donald Trump’s “attack on civil rights and his agenda rooted in racial division.”
The Shelby County decision and its aftermath
Two years before Obama’s speech, the Supreme Court delivered a devastating blow to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 with its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder.
In a 5-4 ruling, the court’s conservative majority gutted the law’s “preclearance” provision, which required states with histories of racial discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting laws. Chief Justice John Roberts justified the decision by claiming “things had changed dramatically” since the VRA’s passage five decades earlier.
The data tells a different story.
Research by Kevin T. Morris, a senior fellow and voting policy scholar with the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Michael G. Miller, a political science professor at Columbia University’s Barnard College, reveals that the racial turnout gap in formerly covered jurisdictions has grown significantly.
“In the average county where Shelby County freed state and, especially, local voting administrators from federal oversight, the relative participation of nonwhite Americans has worsened,” they wrote.
Since 2013, state legislatures in those bright-red states have stayed booked and busy enacting nearly 100 restrictive voting laws. In 2024 alone, at least 10 states enacted 19 laws restricting voting, and at least 317 bills that restricted voting were considered in 40 states,” according to the Brennan Center.
The SAVE Act: A new threat
No longer as obvious as poll taxes or literacy tests, attacks on voting rights are far more sophisticated, and come in the guise of “election integrity” despite little evidence of voter fraud.
They run the gamut: strict ID requirements that disproportionately affect Black and other minority voters; reduced early-voting periods; aggressive voting roll purges; gerrymandered districts that dilute Black voting strength; even prohibitions on providing water to voters waiting in long lines in the heat of the day.
In February, Republicans in Washington announced plans to fast-track the SAVE Act, a bill that would require specific citizenship documents — a birth certificate, passport, or a handful of other approved forms of identification — every time an American registers or re-registers to vote.
The Brennan Center, however, estimates at least 21 million Americans — most of them poor and Black — don’t possess that kind of “show your papers” documentation. In addition, the nonpartisan law and policy organization noted that because this documentation must be presented in person, the legislation “would obliterate or upend longstanding and popular methods of voter registration for all voters, including registration by mail, voter registration drives, online voter registration, and automatic voter registration.”
“Our Cause Too”
“Never did I think that 60 years — 60 years after John was bludgeoned on a bridge — that the cause for which John Lewis and those foot soldiers marched would be our cause too,” Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, a Selma native, said March 5 when she reintroduced voting rights legislation named after the late congressman.
The bill, which has been reintroduced every Congress since Shelby v Holder, is unlikely to pass in the current political climate, with Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of both houses of Congress. But Sewell and other advocates are undeterred.
“We know that the groundswell of public sentiment matters,” Sewell said. “And we’re appealing to the American public to continue to join with us in this fight for better protections for voting rights.”
This weekend, Sewell will lead a commemorative march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Former Vice President Kamala Harris — who knows the consequences of voter suppression and restriction first-hand — posted on social media on March 7 that “we march on.”
It’s “not easy, and we cannot do it alone,” Harris wrote. But we must “recommit to our fight to safeguard the freedom to vote. Together, we must stand for democracy. Together, we must continue our fight for justice, equality, and opportunity for all.”
Or, as Black Lives Matter wrote on X on March 7, “Every so-called win in this country came because Black people refused to back down, even when it cost us everything.”
As John Lewis once wrote to his younger self: “You were beaten on that bridge. You were left bloody. You thought you were going to die. But you would make it. You would live to see your mother and father cast their first votes.”
This article was originally published by Word in Black.
