Selma Marchers Hope for New Activism

The re-enactment of the historic 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery ended Saturday with 3,000 people gathered in the shadow of Alabama’s Capitol to rekindle the spirit of the civil rights movement.

In the 1965 march, 25,000 people gathered in “the Cradle of the Confederacy” to demand voting rights; organizers hoped the 1990 trek would herald a new age of activism.

“It would be a shameful waste if we marched all the way from Selma to Montgomery to go home and sit on our seats of apathy,” said Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who led the weeklong commemorative march.

At the Capitol, where the Confederate battle flag flies over the dome despite blacks’ protests, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the chanting crowd that their message must be taken to the nation’s capital.

“On to Washington for jobs,” Jackson exhorted the gathering. “On to Washington for peace dividends. Keep hope alive.”

Coretta Scott King encouraged the mostly black crowd to keep fighting for racial equality.

“These are the faithful few, and God always uses those who are willing to be used,” said the widow of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose first church is a block down the street from the Capitol steps.

Mrs. King, Jackson and others said blacks had made progress but much remained to be done. Lowery called for corporations “to engage in equitable reinvestment in our communities.”

Jackson later went to meet with former Gov. George C. Wallace at his home. Wallace, who opposed the 1965 march, later won widespread black support that helped win his fourth and final term as governor in 1982.

“If the governor can come from where he was 20 years ago and speak of a moral society where there is economic justice, there is hope for blacks and whites alike,” Jackson said after the meeting.

The rally capped a week in which about 150 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and headed east along a rural highway to Montgomery, covering the path activists took in 1965.

The march 25 years ago came two weeks after “Bloody Sunday,” when white authorities routed black marchers with clubs and tear gas as they tried to cross the bridge over the Alabama River.

The violence at Selma was recorded by television cameras and helped spur Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed ballot box rights for blacks.

In Alabama, black voter registration increased from about 92,000 in 1964 to nearly 250,000 in 1967. And nationwide, the number of black elected officials leaped from 103 in 1964 to 7,226 today.