What would John Lewis do today?
On a Sunday morning 60 years ago, activists rewrote the story of the civil rights movement in their own blood on the streets of Selma, Alabama. State troopers turned their truncheons on a peaceful march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge at the behest of Alabama’s stridently and infamously racist governor George Wallace, protecting Alabama segregation and white supremacy.
John Lewis, then the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later served in Congress – and as a moral force in American politics – for decades. He bore scars from the beating he took that day through the rest of his life.
How should Americans meet today’s challenges to civil rights and democracy? That question percolates among the activists and visitors crowding Selma’s streets this weekend as the Trump administration wages an intense, wide-ranging war on America’s anti-discrimination policies.
“We have a tyrant that’s running the federal government,” said Delvone Michael, a political strategist from Maryland. Lewis would be going from campus to campus, mobilizing for a confrontation, he said. Michael described the moment as a stress test of American resolve that isn’t being met with sufficient opposition either in Congress or the street.
“We don’t see the people that are actually standing up like what happened here, where everyday people stood together and raged against the machine,” Michael said. “You’re not seeing that right in this moment, at the scale necessary to stop this guy.”
Progressive congressional leaders are hearing this criticism.
“We’ve got to make sure that we’re not normalizing this moment and stepping up and being unafraid, and I think we are still here playing by the same book when they don’t follow one.” said congresswoman Nikema Williams as she walked up the bridge on Sunday afternoon. Williams serves in the Atlanta house seat vacated by Lewis’s death in 2020.
The moment today is designed to create chaos, she said. Activists say it should be answered with the kind of effort civil rights leaders of Lewis’ era presented in the face of strident, violent opposition, if the gains of that generation are to be maintained.
“Don’t get me wrong, the last 70 years have not brought us where we should be, but the last 70 years made significant progress in this country, and we have been the beneficiaries,” said Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans and president of the National Urban League. “What falls to us is to ensure that our children and children’s children are not going to litigate the battles of our grandparents.”
John Lewis is beaten by an Alabama state trooper on Bloody Sunday, 7 March 1965. Photograph: AP The election of Donald Trump has led the civil rights division of the justice department to end investigations of discrimination against racial minorities in cases like the “goon squad” assaults in Mississippi and the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. Trump fired two commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – in violation of the law – and its acting chairman has pledged to root out “unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination” instead of its prior role protecting workers of color against race-based discrimination.
“I got a lot of folks saying, what are we going to do?” Morial said. “And they almost are looking for a one punch knockout. Isn’t that one lawsuit? Isn’t there one political move? This is a long trench warfare.”
The US supreme court last year established a doctrine of absolute immunity for acts committed by a president “within their core constitutional purview,” and at least presumptive immunity for official acts within the outer perimeter of their official responsibility. The 6-3 ruling creates a predictable flash point in the conflict between an authoritarian government and American civil rights: a moment when Trump faces a court decision he doesn’t like.
“We’re going to fight in the courts wherever we can, and it’s not going to be enough,” said Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “We’re actually going to have to mobilize people around the country. There are a lot of people who are upset right now, but they’re not standing up, they’re not seeing themselves as protagonists of this story.”
Caleb Jakes, 20, of Newark, described generational despair.
“Too many of us are stuck between fear and anxiety,” he said of other Black twentysomething looking at the world on fire. “So many of us are paralyzed just from imagining that even if I went for it, it’s not going to happen … The regular way of trying to get the system to work in my favor just aren’t appealing enough anymore to merit the effort to stay after it.”
People under 20 have known nothing except losses – economic crisis, civil rights rollbacks and political turmoil, added Donneio Perryman, 20, from Chicago. “Most of us, if we are not stricken by poverty and trying to get out, are just trying to make a way for ourselves and our families right now as our main goals and not the entirety of our race.”
Activists regularly suggest that Trump may be looking for a rationale to invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law and turn troops or police on protesters, tempering their enthusiasm for mass demonstrations.
“There are some of us who are going to be willing to bleed,” Huang said. “Not everybody has to. We are not asking everyone to lay down their lives, but we are saying to everyone that this is your fight, and you have to be counted when the chips are down.”
Sixty years ago, demonstrations that led to conflicts also led to progress.
“We went where we were called,” said Andrew Young, former ambassador to the United Nations and a contemporary of Martin Luther King and Lewis who marched in Selma in 1965. “Amelia Boynton came to see Dr King just that before Christmas, and he told she told him that Jim Clark would not let them hold meetings in their churches because he said they were too political.”
People march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Photograph: Alyssa Pointer/Reuters Boynton was a young Selma activist who organized the march from Selma to Montgomery after an Alabama state trooper killed Jimmie Lee Jackson while he tried to protect his mother from being beaten after an earlier protest. Selma was considered beyond salvation by civil rights activists at the time, but Jackson’s murder and Boynton’s plea drew marchers.
King told Young not to go, Young said.
“We thought they would just turn us around,” Young said of the state troopers. “They didn’t even give them time to pray, or to discuss anything. They just immediately charged.”
The beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge shocked the nation. Pictures of Lewis on the ground with a trooper looming over him, or of Boynton laying broken in the street amid tear gas and horses, ran on the front page of newspapers across the country. ABC News interrupted a documentary about Nazi war crimes as the attack unfolded, cutting to show the violence live in Selma.
The metaphor was not lost on the public or lawmakers. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 five months later.
What is the next Selma?
“I don’t know. And I shouldn’t know,” Young replied. “I mean, there’s nothing, yet I see all the signs. I see the things that people are saying.”
The streets of Selma fill with marchers every year on this Sunday in March, commemorating the events of 1965. This year has drawn an unusually large crowd. Hotel rooms are full for 30 miles in every direction.
Selma itself is caught in amber. Like many towns in Alabama’s Black Belt, Selma has been losing population for decades. Many buildings downtown are a ruin, pock-marked by damage from a tornado in 2023 and unchanged since Bloody Sunday. The march has become a carefully stage-managed parade, with politicians jockeying with the scions of the movement for position at the front of the procession where they can be seen by throngs of photographers from across the country.
The march was scheduled in waves, with thousands of people grouped in time slots by the hour for their chance to walk and be seen.
“I think part of the reason that so many of us came to Selma is because we really draw inspiration in people who had no reason really to believe that they could get freedom,” said Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families. “They were facing what may have looked like an all-powerful force, but they had a faith and desire to work for something bigger and better, and I think we’re here because we have that same spirit.”
The memorial of Bloody Sunday gives the city an economic boost, but after the crowds leave, little changes, said Gary Ransom, a Selma photographer pushing for redevelopment.
“We’ve always been in the spotlight because of all the historic things that happened here,” Ransom said. But between the hurricane and a growing gun violence problem, Selma has been bleeding population, “because the kids don’t have nowhere to go or nothing to do.”
For Bernard Lafayette, a civil rights leader and attorney who marched in Selma on Bloody Sunday, the answer is to build a Black economic fortress that can withstand attack.
“We’re still commemorating Bloody Sunday 60 years later,” he said. “It’s time to make a paradigm shift.” Lafayette has been raising capital to build a factory to manufacture solar panels in Selma. Asked what a 20-year-old activist like Lewis might be expected to do today, Layfayette’s answer was blunt.
“They should be saying, ‘To hell with them and focus on manufacturing,” Lafayette said. “Focus on our resources. Focus on the $2tn per year that we generate. White folks are never going to help us. They enslaved us. We have to come to our own rescue. We have to save ourselves, and we can only do that by using our resources for our people.”