Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1552: Come with me as we share the continuing Jubilee experience!

  Come with me as we share the Bridge Crossing Jubilee on the 52nd Anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I cannot share everything because I could not attend all of the more than 40 events. I don’t even have space to share all I participated in over these five days. Come with me as we share the continuing experience of the Bridge Crossing Jubilee.

  Let’s start on Thursday of last week. I returned from a Senate session in Montgomery. Two television reporters had set up interviews about the Jubilee. I agreed to do the interviews in spite of the potential for negative publicity. I met them at Tabernacle Baptist Church. Rather than respond to the controversy, I tried to address the big picture: the Jubilee would go on; the forty-plus events would go on as planned; and only one event, the Jubilee Festival, would be moved.

Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1498: Jimmie Lee Jackson and the tragedy that was a catalyst for change

  Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black man who lived in Perry County, Ala. became a central figure in voting rights history. Some say he went to a nighttime voting rights rally on February 18, 1965 in Marion, Ala. Others say he did not go to the rally but was waiting at Mack’s Café to take his mother and 82-year-old grandfather home. There is no doubt, however, that all three were in Mack’s Café.

  State troopers had busted the head of Jimmie Lee’s grandfather, Cager Lee, and blood was running down his face. Viola Jackson, his daughter, tried to help. A trooper attacked her. Jimmie Lee, who was unarmed, tried to help his mother take the 82-year-old Cager Lee to a doctor. A state trooper shot him twice in the stomach, and he started running. Other state troopers beat him as he ran. There is no doubt that these events were the forerunners of the Bloody Sunday March and the Selma to Montgomery March. There is no doubt that these events were critical catalysts on the road to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.