Reply #19: RENEW VOTING RIGHTS! [View All]

[MelissaB]

RENEW VOTING RIGHTS!

Author: Tim Wheeler and Joyce Wheeler
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 03/10/05 11:13


40 years after Bloody Sunday, 10,000 march in Selma

SELMA, Ala. — Singing “Ain’t going to let nobody turn me round,” 10,000 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge here March 6 to protest Bush-Cheney voter suppression tactics and to demand renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act set to expire in 2007.

The multiracial throng, men and women, young and old, retraced the steps of voting rights marchers who were clubbed and tear-gassed by Alabama troopers on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965. That brutal attack galvanized the nation to enact the Voting Rights Act a few months later.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), then a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer, was clubbed nearly to death that long-ago day. He led 40 of his U.S. House and Senate colleagues at this 40th anniversary “Bridge Crossing Jubilee.”

Lewis was engulfed by admiring youth. “It is good to see young people out here making some noise,” he told the World as he marched. “A lot of people are too quiet. If you don’t like the direction the country is going, you have the responsibility to stand up, to protest nonviolently.”

More: http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/6597/1/257/