Remembering Bloody Sunday

Sixty years ago, in the wake of the murder of Deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson by state trooper James Bonard Fowler during a peaceful march in Marion, Alabama, the SCLC’s James Bevel called for a march from Selma to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. He and his associates called for the universal right to vote regardless of race, a promise made exactly 100 years before in the 15th Amendment.

Today, as schools cease to teach the civil rights struggle – or even the second half of the 20th century – out of fear of being perceived as “too DEI friendly,” fewer and fewer may learn of the sacrifices once made.

State troopers ended the SCLC’s attempted march on March 7, 1965. Led by figures including Bevel and Amelia Boynton, after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge towards Montgomery, it concluded with the crash of batons and canisters of tear gas. The beating of 600 unarmed protesters was dubbed “Bloody Sunday.” The photo of Boynton’s unconscious body, lying wounded on the bridge, populated front pages worldwide.

Two more SCLC marches would follow with ultimately 25,000 people rallying before the Alabama State Capitol, but those numbers paled before the national outcry against this racial injustice. The protesters campaigned for a new federal voting rights law to enable African Americans to register and vote without harassment. They swung public opinion enough that President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a nationally televised joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, demanded that the House and Senate pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Signed into law three weeks later, it removed legal obstacles for African-American voter registration.

However, to teach this story is to teach “diversity” in the new political lexicon. For example, the Justice Department has urged the American Bar Association to scrap diversity requirements for law schools or risk losing its accreditation power. Some argue that even the history of the civil rights struggle (constituting in a course of its own) would violate this anti-DEI mandate.

Whomever does not remember history is doomed to repeat it, as the old adage goes, and that is the dangerous path our Republic now travels, as evidenced by some recent actions taken in states across the country.

In its expert brief, “Voting Laws Roundup: 2024 in Review,” the Brennan Center for Justice reported that the number of restrictive voting rights laws passed between 2021 and 2024 (79 in total) were nearly triple the amount of those passed between 2017 and 2020 (27 in total).

According to the brief, in 2024 alone, between January 1 to December 31, at least 10 states enacted 19 restrictive voting laws (Louisiana passed eight such laws); at least three states enacted three election interference laws; and at least 21 states enacted 32 expansive voting laws.

It seems history is certainly set to repeat itself. To shut down the Department of Education and restrict educational funding usually leads to history classes being the first to get the ax. Absent education on the voting-rights struggle, how many decades beyond will people feel the batons and the tear gas as a result?

This article originally published in the March 10, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.