The Selma Bridge crossing jubilee: Thousands attend the annual pilgrimage
6th March 2023 · 0 Comments
The Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee has become an annual pilgrimage and a weeklong commemoration of the Voting Rights March of 1965, known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Civil Rights Attorneys Hank and Rose Sanders, who have been married for 41 years, founded the Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee more than 10 years ago. They litigated many civil rights cases, including a lawsuit for the Black farmers, resulting in a $2 billion settlement.
Since launching “The Jubilee” under the auspices of a non-profit organization, thousands of people and three presidents have made the pilgrimage to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate “Bloody Sunday.”
The 2023 Bridge Crossing Jubilee commemorates the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Selma to Montgomery March, and the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Jubilee’s two-page schedule of events began on February 27 with the “Kingian Nonviolence Training” at the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth, & Reconciliation and culminated on Sunday, March 5, 2023, with a litany of activities that started at 7 a.m. and ended at 7 p.m.
There were many cultural and historical events, including a music festival, free workshops, storytelling by foot soldiers of the movement, a salute to youth leaders, a tribute to the foot soldiers, and the March across the bridge to continue the Fight for the Vote.
Celebrities, attorneys, freedom foot soldiers, hip hop artists, a Miss Jubilee Pageant, three church services, a gospel concert, numerous discussions about various facets of voting rights, reparations, legal rights, intergenerational conversations, and an award ceremony were held during “The Jubilee.”
“Jubilee” is derived from the Hebrew word jobel, which means “ram’s horn.” The horn was blown to mark the beginning of the jubilee year, “a year of liberation,” according to a Vatican magazine.
In a sense, The Jubilee celebrates the beginning of African-Americans’ liberation – the ability to vote without the threat of violence – at the ballot box. The mere mention of Bloody Sunday conjures up tears, sorrow, and shock at how human beings could treat others like the protesters for voting rights were treated during the first voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
Led by iconic civil rights leaders, Pastor Hosea Williams of King’s People’s Church of Love, executive director of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), and then-25-year-old activist John Lewis, chairman of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and future U.S. congressman from Georgia, marchers were met by state police as they descended from the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.
The event captured on video showed the horrific blood-letting scenes for the world to see.
Civil rights leaders planned a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Governor George Wallace, one of the most notorious avowed racists of his day, ordered state troopers “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march,” about 600 voting rights advocates set out from the Brown Chapel AME Church on Sunday, March 7, 1965.
Martin Luther King Jr., who had met with President Lyndon Johnson two days earlier to discuss voting rights legislation, remained in Atlanta with his congregation and planned to join the marchers en route the following day.
As they began to cross the steel-arched bridge spanning the Alabama River, the marchers saw the name of Edmund Pettus, a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, on the bridge’s crossbeam, the History Channel reported.
The beat-downs, water hosing, dog biting, rabidly racist state police and posse members set upon Blacks marching for voting rights and protesting the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson, 26, in the nearby town of Marion on February 18, 1965. While protesting for voting rights, state troopers clubbed protesters and killed Jackson while he was trying to protect his mother, who was being beaten by police.
On Bloody Sunday, they knocked marchers to the ground and beat them with police batons. Clouds of tear gas choked marchers while deputies on horseback charged ahead and chased the men, women, and children back over the bridge as they swung clubs, whips, and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire, according to History.com. The late Congressman John Lewis was beaten in the head and had to go to the hospital.
Two weeks later, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and 3,200 civil rights protesters marched the 49 miles from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery – an event that prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.
Several years ago, this yearly event was dubbed “The Annual Pilgrimage to Selma.” Tens of thousands of freedom-loving people flock to Selma the first weekend of every March to hear personal stories from surviving freedom fighters from the movement and walk hand-in-hand with history makers willing to lay down their lives for the right to have a voice in the country they helped to build. For over a decade, the movement’s heroes and other civic, political, and national leaders have made the annual pilgrimage to Selma.
African-Americans voters in the 21st Century owe a debt of gratitude to those who sacrificed their lives on Bloody Sunday for the right to vote. This fact is borne out by Senate minutes that state: On August 4, 1965, the United States Senate passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The long-delayed issue of voting rights had come to the forefront because of a voter registration drive launched by civil rights activists in Selma.
The Jubilee is an informative, engaging, and educational event everyone should attend. Next year’s Jubilee takes place. March 1-3, 2024, in Selma.
This article originally published in the March 6, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
