‘Invisible Giants’ honored in Selma
By Tim Wheeler
People's Weekly World newspaper, www.pww.org
SELMA, Ala. — They were “invisible giants,” women and men who served as foot-soldiers of the struggle for voting rights.
They returned here for the 40th anniversary celebration of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, many graying but most combative as ever.
Some had never left. Amelia Boynton Robinson and Marie Foster, both lifelong residents of Selma, were honored, the latter posthumously, as “Mothers of the Voting Rights Movement” with the unveiling of a black granite monument during this Bridge Crossing Jubilee.
Both women were clubbed by state troopers on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery to demand voting rights. Foster passed away a few years ago, but Robinson, now in her 90s, is still delivering speeches on the theme, “You can kill the dreamer but not the dream.”
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http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2101&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0Renew voting rights! 40 years after Bloody Sunday, 10,000 march in Selma
By Tim Wheeler and Joyce Wheeler
People's Weekly World Newspaper, www.pww.org
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.”
Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.), who led Florida’s “count-every-vote” fightback after the 2000 elections, told the World the strategy now “is to get renewal of the Voting Rights Act early.”
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http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2100&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0