2025 includes three key anniversaries in the Alabama civil rights movement. This December will mark seventy years since the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 2025 is also the sixtieth anniversary of the shooting of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, which led to the March 7th demonstration over the Edmund Pettus bridge that culminated in Bloody Sunday. The city of Selma will remember that day with this weekend’s bridge crossing jubilee.
It’s been sixty years since hundreds of protestors attempted to walk from Selma to Montgomery demanding the right to vote. Images of lawmen with billy clubs beating back peaceful marchers on the day now called Bloody Sunday shocked the nation. It also sparked passage of the Voting Rights Act. Each year, thousands of people return to Selma to remember Bloody Sunday. Ten years ago, it was the late Civil Rights leader and Senator John Lewis who stood in front of 40,000 people celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. He told the story of the day he was beaten.
“On March 7th, 1965, a few innocent children of God–some carrying only a bed roll, a few clutching a simple bag, a plain purse, or a backpack–were inspired to walk 50 dangerous miles from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate the need for voting rights in the state of Alabama,” said the late Congressman and voting rights marcher John Lewis.
Bloody Sunday wasn’t the area’s only march for voting rights in early 1965.
“My dad was all set and ready and he was talking and watching the news,” said Jeanette Howard-Moore. She remembers that February when the movement came to her town.
“We as children knew something big was happening. We didn't know how big, but it was different than it had ever been in our house,” Moore recalled.
That something included children. Civil rights workers with bullhorns stood outside her high school in Marion telling students to skip class and march to town. Moore and her siblings followed along. She was only fourteen and didn’t know what would happen next.
“The police in Marion marched us from the drug store across the street, around the courthouse, to the jail,” Moore said.
The students were board onto school buses that took them to Camp Selma. That was a county prison camp holding Civil Rights demonstrators. Night came. There was no dinner. No heat. No parents. Moore and her siblings stayed in Camp Selma for four days, but that was just the beginning. A couple of weeks later, their father dropped them off on Sunday, March 7 at Brown’s Chapel Church for the march to Montgomery. Moore didn’t want to go.
“They had mentioned people might get hurt going across the bridge. Kids couldn't swim. It was just dangerous,” she said.
Moore had heard their instructions. Kneel. Stay still. Pray. Then she followed the leaders across the bridge.
We could see the police. People on horseback wearing gas masks with whips in their hands. The horses even had something over their face and they were agitated. They were all across the top of the bridge,” Moore described.
The troopers, horses, and sound of popping cans of tear gas got closer.
“You can't breathe in tear gas billowing in the air,” Moore recalled. “And so everybody got up and started running. I don't know what happened.”
The last thing Moore remembers was looking up at the belly of a horse. She came to at the church with a blanket over her head. She thought she was dead. She was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital for her head injury. A week later, she walked the 54 miles in the final march to Montgomery showing that she was okay.
A few years later, Moore moved to Chicago. Leaving Selma and the memories of 1965 behind. But when her family started asking questions, Moore realized she was a part of history.
“I didn't forget,” Moore insists. “I didn't just tell my story to my children, to my family. Just maybe in bits and pieces, but not just tell my story and all of the events. And I kind of think that the majority is like that.”
“I was arrested on two occasions,” said Dianne Harris, another young marcher. “I proudly wear a badge of honor as being a jailbird.”
So like more, Harris left school for a student March. She was 15 when she was sent to that same camp, Selma, and later to the National Guard Armory, where she was struck by a cattle prod that sent an electric shock through her body. Harris was at Bloody Sunday and the final march two weeks later, when they finally made it to Montgomery, but she got there in an unconventional way.
“A fleet of Greyhound buses that transported us to Montgomery, free of charge,” she recalled. “We were told to bring our quilts because back in the day, Black folk didn't own don't own sleeping bags. Bring your beautiful quilts that your ancestors made because you're going to have to sleep on the grounds of St. Jude Catholic School,” said Harris.
Harris was proud to stand at the capital and hear Dr. King speak.
“We have been told all these marches would never get to Montgomery,” she said. “But Dr. King gave his famous speech and at the end, I'm going to try and quote some of the words he said, ‘They said, we wouldn't get here. We'd only get here over their dead bodies. But we are here and we are here to tell the world ain't going to let nobody turn me around.’”
Just like these girls recorded in Selma in 1965, Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around is the first freedom song Harris learned. Now she guides Civil Rights tours in Selma. On August 6th, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act because of marchers like Jeanette Moore, Dianne Harris, and John Lewis. Thousands are expected to return to Selma and make the bridge crossing this Sunday.
