Sixty-one years ago, on March 7, 1965, 600 people stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. They marched for the simple promise of democracy: the right to vote. What met them was not dialogue but violence — billy clubs, tear gas, mounted troopers. “Bloody Sunday” forced the nation to confront two truths: the brutality of racial discrimination and the power of coordinated Black organizing.
Selma was not only about ballots. It was about state power — and who it protects.
The marchers were protesting not just voter suppression, but the police killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black man shot by an Alabama state trooper while protecting his mother during a peaceful protest. His death exposed what Black communities already knew: when democracy threatens entrenched power, the state responds with force.
Today, we are again watching the machinery of state violence turn toward Black and Brown communities…