Civil Right 2005

March 7th of this year marked 40th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March in Alabama. The purpose of the march was to go to the state capital and petition for citizens right to vote. The marches met with resistance from state troopers who attacked the marchers with teargas and billyclubs beating many to unconsciousness and critical injuries. The American television media transmitted to the rest of the country and the world what became to be called "Bloody Sunday". This event and other incidents, many unfortunately fatal, moved then President Lyndon Johnson to sign the 1965 Voting Rights Bill.

I was not on this planet when the Civil Rights Movement started. Starting in the early nineteenth century The 13th,14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution,Blanche K. Bruce, P.B.S. Pinchback, Hiram Revels, court cases like Dred Scott, laws like Jim Crow, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington,W. E. B. Dubois, negro and immigrant lynchings in the nineteenth century, Red Summer, organizations like the NAACP, The Negro Improvement Association led by Marcus Garvey, Edward Brooke, Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, Harlem Renaissance, Thurgood Marshall, Harrry T, and Harriette V. Moore, Rev. George Lee, Brown vs Board of Education, Lamar Smith, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Willie Edwards, The Montgomery Bus Boycott, Public Accomodation Sit Ins, James Meredith, Little Rock, Church Bombings: "Four Little Girls", Virgil Lamar Ware, March on Washington, Medgar Evers, Freedom Summer, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, James Reeb, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo.......

Other Hero's we rarely hear about, but are also important:

Vernon Dahmer: killed for registering people to vote; Wharlest Jackson:killed for being the 1st black to be promoted on his job; and I just read about Carol Jenkins: killed while selling encyclopedia's door to door in an all white neighborhood...

They ALL lost their lives after 1965, for everyday freedoms that I have now!


I am shocked by these events

There are many events and inspiring people I cannot recall who laboured in the 100 years since the first civil and voting rights act of 1865 and years before that. Many lives lost, literacy tests, and diligent souls that worked "HEART and SOUL" to make the lives of today's generation so much better.

Point..

My hope is for renewed interest in this history so that the spirit of progress and hope can be carried on to inspire future generations to perserverance thur obstacles and see a vision of success.

Let us not forget!