More than 460,000 signatures looked like of Sunday on an online petition that calls for putting the name of late Rep. John Lewis on the Selma, Alabama, bridge where authorities beat civil liberties marchers bloody in 1965.
Lewis, who passed away Friday after a months-long battle with pancreatic cancer, led hundreds of activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge— called for a Confederate basic and Ku Klux Klan leader– throughout a civil rights march on March 7,1965 Police charged at the marchers, beating them with clubs and firing tear gas at them in an event that became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
The John Lewis Bridge Project, released last month, looks for to relabel the bridge that crosses the Alabama River after the civil rights icon and to get rid of “other existing signs of the Confederacy.”
The death of Lewis– a Democrat who represented Georgia’s 5th Congressional District– additional ignited assistance for it.
” It’s far previous time to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge after Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon that almost gave his life on that bridge,” Michael Starr Hopkins, a political strategist who developed the project, said in