Why I’m Glad I Went to Selma, AL on March 1, 2020 Story and Pictures by Dr. Yvonne D. Nelson At NEWSCENE, every day in the month is Black History Day and Black History Month. Five years ago, on March 1, 2015, I joined a bus full of individuals who participated on a “Heritage Tours, Inc.” Ford Nelson excursion to Selma, Alabama. On that day, former President Barack Obama was planning to attend the 50th year anniversary of Bloody Sunday, one of, if not the first televised accounting of the racial tensions in the south’s nasty pre-Civil Rights Movement days. On March 1st of this year, 2020, I repeated those same steps, traveling south with a different group of Heritage Tours tourists with the same destination of visiting the Edmund Pettus Bridge to walk in the footsteps of those, 80 of whom were severely injured on March 7, 1965, for just trying to express their right to vote. A young black female growing up in the north on that day in history, I was not quite five years old and I have no recollection of any events of the day and time. I’m sure my mother made sure of that because we certainly did have an old tube, black and white television in the house when I was growing up. Lyndon B. Johnson was the President and his picture might have been in our home, but I can clearly remember pictures of the Kennedy’s, John Fitzgerald and Robert Francis, along with one of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and those of my three WWII Veteran uncles adorning the walls of our living room. I can remember those pictures like I was looking at them on yesterday, but in those years, I just cannot believe that I knew who any of them were. Not at that young age. Even today, 55 years later, something is always responsible for sparking the fire that gets things headed in the wrong direction. Way back on February 18, 1965, during a peaceful voting rights march, Alabama African American civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was brutally beaten and shot by James Bonard Fowler, a Caucasian Alabama State Trooper. In protest of Jackson’s unwarranted and brutal murder, some estimate between 500 and 600 civil rights marchers headed east on Route 80 out of Selma, AL in protest of their right to vote. It was a sunny, but chilly Sunday morning; however, after only traveling a mere six blocks, the group was met by Alabama State Troopers who were assisted by local Alabama lawmen. These fully armored and masked white lawmen viciously attacked and beat the unarmed group of black protesters with night sticks and sprayed the air heavily with tear gas. Those that were still standing were driven back into Selma. They did not make it across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on that day. Due to the invention of the TV, many all over the world watched and the day became known as “Bloody Sunday”. President Lyndon B. Johnson, nor any other nonracist person, could deny the lack of fairness or adequate reasoning for the beatings that ensued. When President Johnson spoke on television regarding the matter he stated that it was “wrong to deny anyone the right to vote,” and he mentioned the need (for whites) to stop practicing “bigotry and injustice” and the need to strive for “full equality” regardless of a person’s skin color saying, “…their cause must be our cause too.” Two weeks later a new march was planned and although he was asked not to attempt the first crossing, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did cross on this second trip where the marchers were protected by Federal troops. I hadn’t turned five yet, but on August 6, 1965, a few weeks before my birthday, the passage of the voting rights bill was signed into law by then President Lyndon B. Johnson. I’ve personally been an Election Commission Poll Worker for the Shelby County Election Commission for a couple of 2
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