By The Editors

Just as when they first flashed around the world forty-five years ago, the film and photographs from the civil rights battleground that was Selma, Alabama in March 1965 still have the power to horrify—and inspire.

The photos and film capture the long line of demonstrators, walking peacefully but purposefully on the sidewalk across that city’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7 of that year to begin their 54-mile march to Montgomery, the state capitol.

At the foot of the bridge, they are met by a massed mob of 200 helmeted Alabama state police and county sheriff’s deputies — some on foot; some on horseback – guns at their hips, three-foot-long nightsticks in their hands and wearing gas masks. The police demand that they turn back and disperse. The marchers refuse; they kneel for a moment of prayer. A tense silence follows; and then the order to the police is given: Attack!

Forty-five years ago this Sunday, March 7, the brutal police charge at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the resulting photographs and film of armed police gassing and clubbing unarmed, peaceful men and women to the ground were the acts that ended the reign of legalized racism in the American South.

A week later, on March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson sent to Congress the legislation that would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the act which more than any other made America a democracy in fact, not just rhetoric.

Friday, March 5, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) marked the 45th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma in the spirit the marchers of that day would have appreciated—by working with the citizens of Selma and other communities to ensure the voting rights won that day remain secure.

Attorneys and staff members joined with local leaders and the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute to sponsor two community meetings concerned with maximizing black power today. One session focused on the movement promote the importance of a complete black response to the 2010 census survey, which began this month. The second event discussed why the battle for voting rights continues today, more than four decades after the Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

Debo P. Adegbile

Debo P. Adegbile, LDF’s Director of Litigation, said that the significant progress that black Americans have forged in the political arena through their use of ballot does not mean that “officials in some jurisdictions have not continued to try to put serious obstacles in the way [of blacks exercising their right to vote]. There are those who want to use the progress we’ve achieved to say the protections [of the Voting Rights Act] are no longer needed. They’re wrong.”

Adegbile argued the case last year before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court upheld perhaps the Act’s most important provision—the one which bars certain jurisdictions across the country from changing voting procedures without first gaining approval from the Department of Justice or a special federal court panel.

Before leaving for the Selma events, Adegbile spoke March 4 at a panel discussion in New York City on what progress has—and has not—been made on voting rights since 2000. The panel was sponsored by Demos, a non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization; the Progressive States Network; Columbia University; New York Law School; the American Constitution Society and LDF.

The consensus among Adegbile and his co-panelists, Tova Andrea Wang, of Demos and The Century Foundation, and Professor Alexander Keyssar, of Harvard and author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, was that the events of the past decade, from the election controversies of the 2000 presidential election to the Supreme Court case Adegbile argued, have made it clear the expansion of the right to vote the Voting Rights Act produced continues to demand the most energetic protection.