Montgomery, Alaa.. In 1965, black Americans demonstrated peacefully for Voting rights They were beaten by Alabama state forces before returning two weeks later to continue their march under federal protection. Keith Odom was a young child at the time.
Now 62, the Union man is back and grandfather of three Some of their final steps. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, where he joined dozens of other activists on two buses bound for Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he got off his bus and headed to Dexter Street, where the original march concluded.
“History is here — to be a part of it, to see it, to feel it,” said Odom, who is Black.
His voice trailed off when he saw the Alabama Capitol and the stage that sat roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original march.
Odom expressed his regret that he and his fellow bus passengers did not limit themselves to commemorating that influential day in the world. Civil rights movement. Instead they came to renew the fighting. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to send the resolution Voting Rights Act For the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson to signSecuring and expanding the political power of black and other nonwhite voters for more than half a century.
Saturday’s “All Roads Lead South” rally was the first mass organizing response after A.J US Supreme Court ruling Which He severely underestimated this landmark law. After they tossed out Louisiana’s majority-black congressional district, the justices concluded A.J 6-3 Judgment Considering race when drawing political lines is itself discriminatory. This has stimulated many countries, Including Alabamal Redrawing US House districts In ways that make it difficult for black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect the legislators of their choice.
“I’m not trying to live a backwards life,” Odom said. “I want to move forward, so my grandchildren can move forward.”
The passenger lists and the scene when the riders reached Montgomery seemed echoes and rhymes of the past and the present.
“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was very excited,” said Judge Washington, a student at Kennesaw State University, named because her mother and grandmother believed in the American system. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”
No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law. The youngest attendees were born when Democrat Barack Obama was elected as the first black president in 2008.
Kobe Chernuchin is 18 years old, white and just graduated from high school in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day photographing Khaila Dube, a 29-year-old executive at the organization, as she poses for the group’s followers on social media.
“I believe in the power of showing up,” he said.
The buses departed from the Georgia congressional district he once represented John Lewisbloodstained on Edmund Pettus Bridge In Selma, Alabama, when he was 25 years old. Lewis died in 2020, but some on buses celebrated Saturday by naming proposed federal election reform after him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would overturn the U.S. Supreme Court, revitalize the Voting Rights Act, and ban the kind of gerrymandering instigated by Republican President Donald Trump.
Darren Owens, 27, said: “I’m here because of the same forces that attracted John Lewis when he was a student.” He worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now coaches Democratic candidates.
“Political activism is personal,” Owens said, explaining that he attended Saturday as a citizen, not as a political professional. “Sometimes those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black person living in a Southern state, I am committed to work that stops what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person representing me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.”
When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on the streets of Montgomery. A wounded Lewis recovered during the Second March in 1965.
This time many of the Alabama soldiers and local officers who marched into the area were black.
The buses and sandwich lunches were arranged by Fair Fight Action, a legacy of the political network created by the Georgia Democratic Party Stacey Abramswho became a national figure in her failed runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first black woman elected governor in US history. No black woman has achieved this feat yet.
At various points, Montgomery has described itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern civil rights movement.
“Our country seems to be stuck in this pattern of making progress, and then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to fight the same battle again just to get where we were,” said Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is now a civil rights attorney in Atlanta.
She stood on the other side of the church where the young king led Montgomery Bus Boycott In 1955 and not far from the place Jefferson Davis He was sworn in in 1861 as the abolitionist president of the Confederacy.
Nguyen and her sister, Bee, 44, who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women as they walked. Carol Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old Montgomery residents who have been friends since their days at segregated high school and then the newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.
“I don’t call this ‘fusion,'” Ashford said, gesturing to her dark skin. “This was never true integration, and it’s not like we could ever integrate.”
Burton described them as “second wave” black students. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “And we had to support each other.”
They remember that their parents could not vote in an era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually banned. But they smiled as they shared their family history with the Nguyen family.
Immigrants, descendants of slaves and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths, Burton said. “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities that the country promised us,” she said. “They never committed to that.”
For Odom, who begins his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court has reinforced that history by refusing to see some racially sensitive election policies as a means of ensuring fair representation, not just the “technical right to vote.”
He remembers the decades of his life he represented Strom Thurmonda pro-segregation Democratic governor, became a “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and a U.S. Senator – now a Republican – in the 21st century. Odom said he fears losing his state US Representative Jim ClyburnHe is a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Through redistricting.
“They want to get rid of this legacy while we still live with Strom?” Odom said.
Odom said he was also concerned that the young men who participated on Saturday were not vanguard but extremists.
“I was talking to a 20-year-old coworker about this trip,” he said. “She told me she supports me but doesn’t want to do it or work for anyone” running for office. “I wondered what any of them would do for her.”
However, on his way home, he said: “I will still tell her what I saw and what I heard.”