Linda Lowery was simply 14 years previous in 1965 when she marched 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in assist of voting rights.
She and several other different Black youngsters have been with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that day, taking it upon themselves to display for civil rights at a younger age.
On Jan. 2, 1965, King spoke earlier than 700 folks at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which launched what’s acknowledged now because the Selma Voting Rights Marketing campaign. It was led by the Southern Christian Management Convention (SCLC) and the Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as they ready to extend voter registration for Black folks within the rural South and in America as a complete.
“Yes, I was [in the march] at 14. Dr. King had been to Selma numerous times, and the young people of Selma had been trained in the principles of nonviolence, starting with SNCC and Dr. Bernard Lafayette,” Lowery informed HuffPost.
“SNCC had already been here training and encouraging young people to get involved in a nonviolent movement and training us on the principles of nonviolence.”
For Lowery, now 75, and others who protested in assist of civil rights 60 years in the past, there’s a stage of irony that Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration will happen Monday, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal vacation. Many individuals throughout America cringed when Trump in contrast himself to King final August, whereas describing the big crowds of individuals he has spoken to at his marketing campaign rallies.
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything — same number of people, if not we had more,” Trump stated.
Trump’s odd feedback on King weren’t restricted to that.
He at one level final 12 months referred to Republican Mark Robinson, the disgraced North Carolina gubernatorial nominee, as “Martin Luther King on steroids” in a speech.
“I told that to Mark, I think you are better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two.”
Trump’s actions and rhetoric have deeply offended folks through the years. That perspective is particularly true for Kirk Carrington, a Black man from Selma who additionally marched these 54 miles as a young person.
Carrington was 16 on the time. He remembers the big variety of youngsters and even youthful children taking part within the civil rights motion years prior, and his opinion on Trump profitable a second time period could be very easy: “America was not ready for a woman to be a president,” Carrington informed HuffPost.
He talked about that every time Trump gained an election, he occurred to be operating towards a girl: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024.
“Both women he beat were more qualified than he is,” Carrington stated. “And the people he is surrounding himself with, they are not qualified. He wants incompetent people around him.”
When Carrington was rising up, America was a segregated nation. It was one thing he was born into as a baby, coping with racism. However now, Carrington says, racism is available in a special kind.
Dianne Harris, who was 15 when she marched in Selma and now works as a civil rights historic tour information, remembers when King was invited to her hometown, and he or she remembers how essential many Black folks in Selma thought it was for him to come back.
Since Trump’s November election, Harris has been doing loads of praying, she stated. The religious Christian stated America wants prayer and the nation wants leaders who need to serve all of the folks, not just a few.
Listening to Trump’s rhetoric and guarantees to alter legal guidelines and insurance policies, she stated, she detects worry in his strategy.
“It is ironic that the observation of MLK Day and the inauguration fall on the same day. However, I do feel that many Blacks and other people who believed in what Dr. King stood for and he was trying to be about the essence of civil rights and good for mankind — all those good things ― I think the momentum of us celebrating Dr. King’s birthday will not be diminished by the inauguration,” Harris informed HuffPost.
Charles Kelly/Related Press
“The voters have spoken. It may not be the choice that many of us chose, but the voters spoke. And we will deal with the cards that have been played.”
All three Selma marchers, Harris, Carrington and Lowery, wished America to alter for the higher. However they imagine that America has gotten to the purpose the place it’s now as a result of there’s nonetheless a stage of hate in folks’s hearts and that Trump is only a image of that hate.
Lowery remembers when she was 14, marching throughout the bridge, being chased by a Selma deputy and Alabama state trooper.
On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Lowery recalled, she ran right into a crowd of tear gasoline and a person behind her struck her. She stated she was kicked by a state trooper so onerous that she rose off the bottom from the impression. Lowery stated she thinks she handed out as she was being crushed. When she awoke, she was on a stretcher being loaded right into a hearse. She informed the medics she was not lifeless and jumped off the stretcher.
“I let them know I was not dead and I was not getting into that hearse. And then I started running again,” Lowery informed HuffPost.
Lowery can nonetheless keep in mind most of the officers’ faces, saying the courageous youngsters of Birmingham and Selma “put the word ‘unity’ back into ‘community’” as they confronted the specter of violence from regulation enforcement within the Jim Crow period.
She likened the seems to be of the boys’s faces as they have been beating her that day to the viral pictures and video of a white police officer in Minneapolis as he knelt on the neck of George Floyd on Might 25, 2020, killing the Black man on the road.
“It was the same look that Derek Chauvin had on his face when he so arrogantly looked into the camera as he had his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck. And it was 55 years between the two incidents. And I could not see where anything we had done had made a difference in the hearts of people,” Lowery stated.
“There has always been some cosmetic change, and that was it. It didn’t change people’s hearts. It has not changed, and that is the hurting part. People gave their lives to make a change, and the only difference it made was painted over, it was cosmetic.”
