Thousands of marchers from around the nation are gathered in Selma, Alabama for this weekend's 61st annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee.The "Bloody Sunday" event marks the day in 1965, when Alabama State Troopers attacked peaceful protesters, as they were attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the right to vote. This year's celebration will pay special tribute to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who passed away last month at the age of 84.
APR news interviewed the civil rights icon for the news team’s international award-winning documentary “The King of Alabama” about the death of Doctor Martin Luther King, junior. Jackson told a student group at the University of Alabama in 2018 how the Selma voting rights march ranked in importance alongside the Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery, by the order of President Abraham Lincoln.
“The right to vote come out of Selma, Alabama first Sunday in March 1965 you should either be there Sunday, going across that bridge, or have a big celebration on this campus. Because that event made it possible for you to be here,” Jackson told UA students in 2018.
Another name likely to come up during the observance is Bernard LaFayette. He was the advance man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died. Bernard LaFayette, III, said his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 85.
On March 7, 1965, the beating of future congressman John Lewis and voting rights marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge led the evening news, shocking the nation’s conscience and pushing Congress to act. But two years before “Bloody Sunday,” it was LaFayette who quietly set the stage for Selma and the advances in voting rights that would follow.
LaFayette was one of a delegation of Nashville students who in 1960 had helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the South. SNCC crossed Selma off its map after some initial scouting determined “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared,” LaFayette said.
But he insisted on trying anyway. Named director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, LaFayette moved to the town and, with his former wife Colia Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of the local people, convincing them change was possible and creating momentum that could not be stopped. He described this work in a 2013 memoir, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”
The many dangers LaFayette faced included an assassination attempt on the same night Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, in what the FBI said was a conspiracy to kill civil rights workers. LaFayette was beaten outside his home before his assailant pointed a gun at him. His calls for help brought out a neighbor with a rifle. LaFayette found himself standing between the two men, asking his neighbor not to shoot.
