Thousands Relive Selma March That Led to Voting Act : Civil rights: The peaceful event marks the anniversary of ‘bloody Sunday’ when activists and law officers clashed on the Alabama River bridge.

Thousands of people on Sunday reenacted the bloody civil rights confrontation of 25 years ago that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act--marching, singing and even staging a mock attack that included recorded screaming and billowing smoke from a machine.

The event marked the anniversary of the March 7, 1965, “bloody Sunday,” when 525 civil rights activists were set upon by lawmen who clubbed and gassed them at the Edmund Pettus Bridge as they tried to march to Montgomery. The national outrage that followed prompted Congress to enact the landmark legislation.

This Sunday the marchers celebrated winning the right to vote and issued a call to arms for civil rights battles that still are being fought.

A quarter-century ago, voting was the central issue. Sunday, education was the rallying cause. In addition, discrimination against minorities and the poor “has as much importance as a national issue as the voting rights issue had in 1965,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, in Selma for the celebration, declared in an interview.

Longtime activists from across the nation, many wearing overalls or jeans, gathered under the blue skies and warm sunshine to relive the 1965 march, listen to speeches and to try to apply the Selma experience of 1965 to a national civil rights agenda of 1990. The crowd was estimated by local police at 5,000.

No violence was reported.

Twenty-five years ago, 80 marchers were injured as they were beaten back by police and state troopers. Many participants then retreated to the Brown Chapel AME Church. Sunday, the reenactors rallied there before heading to the bridge a few blocks away.

“It was really ugly,” recalled Charles Robertson, who marched in 1965. Now a 48-year-old college counselor, Robertson remembered that mounted police “tried to hurdle us. People were bloody. Everybody came here” to the church. “It was a real Vietnam-camp kind of thing.”

It also was “holy ground,” shouted the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in a speech just before marchers headed for the bridge. “We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.”

Selma may be a metaphor for the unfinished effort to achieve racial harmony. This city has been racially divided for months over a decision by the white-controlled school board not to renew the contract of Norward Roussell, the black school superintendent.

Signs of the strain could be seen Sunday. Most of the marchers were black. Selma Mayor Joe Smitherman, who is white, had been told by organizers not to show up because they are angry about his opposition to Roussell.

Seen heading home after the marchers had crossed the bridge, Smitherman, who was in office during the 1965 march and was an admitted segregationist then, said he oversaw this year’s events from a fire department ladder truck near the bridge. “Everything was very peaceful,” he said. “It couldn’t have gone better.”

Ronald Walters, a political science professor at Howard University, said he was “dubious about the long-term impact” of Sunday’s events. However, he added that being here was “doing something for youngsters that universities cannot do.”

Many college students who made the trip here in buses agreed.

Amini Jackson and Hilary Glass, both black freshmen at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, came to learn. “We want to know more about what went on in the past,” Jackson said.

“Hopefully, we’ll learn not to repeat the past,” Glass added.

At the bridge, the smoke machine and the faked beatings--with marchers posing as police officers--recalled the real event, and, as the march resumed after the smoke cleared, people began chanting: “Fired up. Ain’t gon’ take it no more.”

On the other side of the bridge, which spans the Alabama River, Jackson exhorted the crowd: “Forward ever! Backward, never!”

Then much of the crowd headed west, back across the bridge into downtown Selma.