Today marks the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday— a pivotal point in the Selma movment for Black Americans’ freedom rights, directly resulting in the necessary pressure for passage of the Voting Rights Act, crippled by the Republican-led Supreme Court in 2013. There’s a straight line from that decision to our fascist takeover today.
I’d like to highlight that the March 7, 1965 protest was in direct response to the police murder of 26-year-old Army veteran Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was hunted and killed during a peaceful protest in Marion, Alabama two weeks prior. Malcolm X was assassinated three days later.
At Jackson’s funeral, the idea emerged to march from Selma to Montgomery to place Jimmie Lee Jackson’s body at the steps of the state capitol.
Another point I’d like to highlight: dozens of racist state troopers who beat peaceful protestors on Bloody Sunday were accompanied by dozens more deputized white supremacist civilians— an actual fascist body of thugs— and the American Nazi Party had been present multiple times in Selma to counter-protest voting rights actions there.
Do you see? Fascism is what we’ve been fighting against for over a hundred years in the US. Stay in the fight and SHOW UP to salvage what we have left. A future self-determined, still in pursuit of multiracial democracy.
(All artwork is from our National Book Award & Eisner Award winning work March: Book Three— written by John Lewis & Andrew Aydin, drawn and lettered by me. Learn more here, and order signed copies directly from me here if you’re interested. Thanks for standing up for our work, keeping it in classrooms and libraries, and contributing to its survival.)
