By Donna Bryson
SELMA, Alabama, May 18 (Reuters) – Betty Strong Boynton marched into history as a teenager in the 1960s, when she was among the hundreds of peaceful protesters attacked by club-wielding Alabama state troopers on Bloody Sunday – a day that marked a turning point in the struggle for civil rights.
Decades later, at 77, Boynton retraced the route of the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march and joined a protest against Alabama’s plans to eliminate one of two seats in Congress held by Black politicians through rushed redistricting drives ahead of the November midterm elections.
Such efforts by Republican-led southern states – Alabama as well as Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee – follow a Supreme Court ruling last month that gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
In the wake of that decision, Reuters visited Selma, the city most associated with the Voting Rights Act, and spoke to three veterans of the civil rights era who described feeling a deep sense of loss.
“We’re going to have to get out there in the streets. We’re going to have to go door-to-door,” explaining the decision’s impact and urging people to vote, Boynton said. She spoke from her home in Selma, which is decorated with photos of the civil rights era.
‘BLOODY SUNDAY’ WAS A TURNING POINT
The brutality on March 7, 1965, captured in footage that was seen around the world, prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, to send troops to Alabama to protect marchers on a 54-mile trek to Montgomery, the state capital.
Boynton was 16 when she ran from the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, and said she narrowly escaped a whip-wielding man on horseback. Another woman who was there, Amelia Boynton Robinson, who was depicted in one of the most searing photos of that day – beaten bloody and unconscious – would go on to become her-mother-in-law.
Four months later, Johnson, citing “the outrage of Selma,” signed the Voting Rights Act. He knew the political cost, accurately predicting an exodus of white Democrats to the Republican Party.
In the majority ruling for the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito stripped out protections in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which had been used for decades to overturn voting maps deemed to have racially discriminatory impact.
“The history of struggle for voting rights is personal,” said lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who is from Delaware and founded a human rights organization in Montgomery in 1989. “Every person who grew up in this community, every person who has a connection to this community, knows the pain of exclusion, knows the extent to which people in power have tried to keep Black people from participating in democracy.”
FIGHTING ON
Initially, the Supreme Court ruling made Barbara Barge, who took part in Selma protests leading to Bloody Sunday, feel “that what we did was nothing. That it had no merit.”
Then Barge, who works as a tour guide to civil rights sites, remembered a chance encounter decades ago with an 88-year-old man in Mississippi. He was moved to see her car license plate was from Selma’s Dallas County.
He placed her hand on his chest, she said, and thanked her for giving him the right to vote before he died.
Civil rights activist Faya Rose Toure moved to Selma in the 1970s to open a law firm, drawn by the history of the movement. The city of 18,000 is more than 80% Black.
Her law firm’s reception desk is stocked with voter registration forms and sample ballots.
The office is near a cemetery shaded by live oaks with a well-maintained Confederate memorial dotted with secessionist flags. Toure sees the flags as anti-democratic, saying they represent the endurance of white supremacist ideas.
She said she urges Black people to work with national groups that are broadly concerned about the state of America’s democracy.
“Prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, there was no democracy in America,” she said.
ALABAMA AND THE REDISTRICTING PUSH
Black voters make up a quarter of the electorate in Alabama. Yet no Black politician currently holds statewide office in the state.
In 2024, Alabama voters for the first time elected two Black members to Congress, returning Terri Sewell, whose district includes Selma and parts of Birmingham, for an eighth term, as well as newcomer Shomari Figures, whose district includes Montgomery. Both are Democrats.
White Republicans hold the state’s five other House seats.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, said in a statement that the Supreme Court decision was an acknowledgment that the South has changed. “Laws designed for a different era do not reflect the present reality,” the statement said.
Alabama Republicans have targeted Figures’ seat as part of a broader nationwide redistricting push ahead of the midterms, an effort civil rights leaders and experts say could diminish Black political power and representation across the South.
If Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina join Tennessee in passing new maps, the redistricting that followed the Supreme Court ruling will eliminate at least four districts with a majority or plurality of Black voters.
In a video statement on May 11, Marshall said his job was “to put the legislature in the best possible legal position to draw a congressional map that favors Republicans 7-0.”
Marshall did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
Figures, speaking to Reuters within sight of the capitol steps where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the marchers in 1965, said Alabama has made progress since then, but not enough. Without the guardrails of the Voting Rights Act, further gains are uncertain, he said.
“Martin Luther King used to always warn that progress never rolled in on the wheels of inevitability,” Figures said. “It was something that happened because people pushed, people fought, people asked for it, people demanded, people stood up, people protested.”
(Reporting by Donna Bryson. Additional reporting by Jayla Whitfield-Anderson; Editing by Suzanne Goldenberg)
