'Bloody Sunday' paved road to Obama White House, activists say (CNN)

[struggle4progress]

By Kim Segal and John Zarrella
CNN

SELMA, Alabama -- ... In 1965, civil rights leaders organized three voting rights marches in Selma. The first, on March 7, 1965, was from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Bob Mants was one of the organizers. He remembers how they decided who would lead the march for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"They flipped coins to decide who would lead for SCLC, and Hosea <Williams> lost. So he was to lead the march," recalls Mants.

Williams and Georgia Rep. John Lewis, who was then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led hundreds of civil rights marchers over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As the marchers crossed over the bridge, which spans the Alabama River, state and local police waited on the other side in riot gear. The marchers were tear-gassed and pummeled with billy clubs. Network news cameras captured the violence that outraged much of the nation ...

"We'd be foolish and naive to think that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States is an end," cautions Mants. "There are still some other basic and fundamental issues that this country has to deal with ... and one of the major concerns is the distribution of wealth" ...

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/15/zarrella.selma.pennsylvania/index.html?eref=rss_politics

[EFerrari]

1. "Pummeled with billy clubs" is an extreme understatement.

John Lewis still has scars and he's lucky to be alive.

We're lucky he's alive, too. :)

[struggle4progress]

2. The footage here gives, I think, a realistic picture of the violence of the era

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZWdDI_fkns

[EFerrari]

3. PBS aired a documentary not long ago and I saved it to watch

several times -- because even if this happened in my lifetime, I take it for granted. Not purposefully, but having never had my own head cracked and having only enjoyed the results of those efforts, that was my default. And that seemed wrong to me.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/10_march.html

[struggle4progress]

4. It's a great series: I watched a re-airing of it in the early 90s