Changes in tone, intent mark 60th Anniversary Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee

  For the last six decades, people have returned to the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge each year. They have come to remember the pain and suffering early Civil Rights Movement foot soldiers endured.

  The 60th Anniversary Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee, a weeklong event, commemorated March 7, 1965, when marchers were brutally beaten by white Alabama state troopers and sheriff’s deputies as they tried to cross the bridge en route to the state Capitol in Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black people.

From preaching to the chickens to preaching to the angels

  News of the passing of Congressman John Lewis hit me hard. I have never met a more extraordinarily kind and generous man. He was a true testament to the goodness to be found in each of us. I never grew tired of hearing him tell his story.

  Congressman Lewis grew up just outside of Troy, Alabama, not far from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s headquarters in Montgomery. He was a wonderful storyteller in the tradition of Black family stories of struggle and triumph. And he was funny. I’ve heard the congressman’s story of “preaching to the chickens” dozens of times, and each time, I could see a young John Lewis preaching to the family chickens as he dreamed of becoming a minister one day.

Celebrating the Freedom Riders

  On May 4, 1961, seven Black and six white civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders boarded a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C. to travel through the Deep South to test the 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia – a ruling that found segregation of interstate transportation, including bus terminals, was unconstitutional.