Selma

First , there was “bloody Sunday” and “turnaround Tuesday,” then there was a rally in Boston in 1965 over housing discrimination and school segregation. Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior led the protest in Boston as well as Selma. The sixtieth anniversary of this demonstration in the city known as the “cradle of liberty” is expected to draw thousands of people at the same site to honor and reflect on the historic event.

Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights marchers walking in pairs across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965. The marchers were protesting white officials' refusal to allow Black Alabamians to register to vote, as well as the killing days earlier of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a minister and voting rights organizer who was shot by a state trooper in nearby Marion. APR listeners heard from marchers as young as fourteen.

2025 includes three key anniversaries in the Alabama civil rights movement. This December will mark seventy years since the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 2025 is also the sixtieth anniversary of the shooting of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, which led to the March 7th demonstration over the Edmund Pettus bridge that culminated in Bloody Sunday. The city of Selma will remember that day with this weekend’s bridge crossing jubilee.

As people get ready to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Selma to Montgomery March and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts just opened a show of photographs taken by Spider Martin in those days.

2025 includes three key anniversaries in Alabama’s fight for civil rights. This December is the seventieth anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This year also marks sixty years since two events in and around Selma. Next week marks the sixtieth anniversary of the civil rights incident known as “bloody Sunday,” and the shooting that inspired it. An Alabama State Trooper shot activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, who died eight days later. APR news collaborated with the University of Alabama’s Center for Public Television to bring you this account from someone who was there…

The nation of Denmark has been making the news lately because of Donald Trump and Greenland. The island nation belongs to the Danish, and the re-elected President wants to buy it or take it over. But, that’s not the only thing Denmark is aware of when it comes to the United States. This year marks key anniversaries in the U.S. civil rights movement. How Denmark views this history can give a window into how Europe sees the United States.

For BRELAND, the last few years have been a whirlwind. He released his debut album, 2022’s “Cross Country,” a fluid approach to country music that now feels prescient because it's the direction the genre continues to move in. He just released a new EP under the provocative title, “Project 2024," inspired by a trip he took to Selma.

Vice President, and presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The long-awaited White House visit with President Biden, and then with Harris, comes at an important moment for all three politicians. How Harris feels about the situation in Israel and Gaza may have been framed by a speech she delivered in Selma.

Dorie Ann Ladner, a longtime fighter for freedom and equality in her home state of Mississippi with contributions to the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and voter registration drives, and a Selma voting rights marcher, has died, her family confirmed.

Vice President Kamala Harris told thousands gathered for the 59th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attacks on civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, that fundamental freedoms, including the right to vote, are under attack in America even today.