“In high school, I did not learn about Bloody Sunday or how Blacks were badly beaten just for trying to gain the right to vote,” said Michael Burns, a 19-year-old student at Georgia State University. “I learned this history from watching the movie ‘Selma.’ And after I saw the movie, I realized that it was important that I be here, not only to commemorate the awful events that took place fifty years ago but to publicly commit myself to fighting all forms of justice.”
As tears swelled in his eyes, Burns and several of his friends locked arms with a group of older activists and made the walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday, just as President Barack Obama and others had done the day before, and just as the young John Lewis—then an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and now a congressman from Georgia—had done five decades ago.
Back then, Lewis was one of about 600 demonstrators who set out on a 50-mile march to Montgomery for voting rights, when Sheriff Jim Clark’s deputies met them at the foot of the bridge and attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas.
Lewis, 74, was clobbered across the head with a billy club and suffered a skull fracture.
“Our country will never be the same because of what happened on this bridge,” he told the crowd that lined the streets and stood in silence as he spoke.
Obama, who was introduced by Lewis, said that Selma was an important milestone in the fight for civil rights.
