Unarmed blacks are killed by the police at five times the rate of unarmed whites. At least one in three blacks killed by police were identified as unarmed.
In 2015, police killed at least 102 unarmed black people, nearly two each week. Of these cases, only ten resulted in police being charged, and only two cases saw convictions of the officers involved. One officer received a four-year prison sentence. The other officer was sentenced to jail for one year, though he was allowed to serve his time exclusively on weekends.
Fifty years ago, they were six hundred brave and strong. On March 8, 2015, I stood where they stood, above the Alabama River, feet planted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for the Confederate general and grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. I could almost taste the blood spilled on that Sunday, March 7, 1965. Blood of the peaceful protestors on the “Walk for Freedom,” from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery in support of voting rights—even though the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified nearly one hundred years earlier, granted citizens the right to vote, regardless of race, color, or previous servitude. But, as it turned out, only on paper.
In 1965, in Dallas County, Alabama, more than half the population was black, but 98 percent of registered voters were white, despite many months of thwarted voter registration efforts. On the bridge that day, unarmed men, women, and children, lined up two by two, were met with a wall of state troopers in helmets and gas masks, some on horseback, flanked by a posse of Confederate flag–waving men who’d heeded the sheriff’s call that morning to report to the courthouse to become deputized.
The civil rights marchers voiced their desire to talk. But talking wasn’t on the other side’s agenda—Alabama governor George Wallace had ordered the use of “whatever measures” necessary. Clubs beat, horses charged, dogs bit, tear gas fired. Screams arose from one side, cheers from the other. Heads were bashed unconscious, eyes blinded, people trampled.
It was another horrific day in Alabama, what would become known as Bloody Sunday. A couple weeks earlier, during a peaceful civil rights demonstration in a nearby town, a twenty-six-year-old black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, his mother, and his eighty-two-year-old grandfather ran into a restaurant for cover from violent state troopers. Badly beaten, Jimmie—a hospital worker, army veteran, and church deacon—was trying to protect his mother from a policeman’s club when he was fatally shot. The officer who shot him, identified to the public only as Fowler, was transferred to Birmingham, where he was promoted. A year later, Fowler would kill another unarmed black man inside a jail.
Holding a mirror to the present day, these events in 1965 were a heartbreaking reminder of how, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Here in Dallas County, now 80 percent black and the poorest county in Alabama, with nearly a third of the population living below the poverty line, I stood on the bridge that still bore the name of the Ku Klux Klan leader, and I stood with the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement. We’d lost the gains of the civil rights movement on the back of the criminal justice system.
Dorsey Nunn on my left, Daryl Atkinson on my right, we held a sign that said, “FROM THE BACK OF THE BUS TO THE FRONT OF THE PRISON.” We were starting on the reverse side, in Montgomery and facing Selma, the destination the original protestors never made it to. Reverend Kenneth Glasgow declared, “We’re marching in reverse because we got to go back and fix some things.”
I could feel the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King. I met an old man using a walker, who’d been there on Bloody Sunday and, every year since, had crossed the bridge. Same with a woman in a wheelchair being pushed across; fifty years earlier she’d been knocked unconscious and tossed like litter to the side of the bridge.
When we arrived to the top, I looked out to the Selma side. The sight sent chills over me. There awaited thousands upon thousands, a massive crowd squeezed so tightly together people could barely move. As a ribbon was pulled back, everyone else started across. In that moment, my persistent worries that I could never do enough, that I was barely making a dent, vanished. Moving toward me was a collective force. Moving toward me, shoulder to shoulder, inch by inch, was determination.