Black leaders highlight legacy of Bloody Sunday ahead of Biden’s State of the Union

President Biden’s State of the Union address takes place on the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, and Black leaders around the nation are urging the president to address the fight for equity in his speech.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) are expecting Biden to mention the anniversary of a key marker in the civil rights fight, and have pushed him to focus on the need to address racial justice.

“A lot of times we talk about Bloody Sunday … as if it’s a vestige of decades past,” caucus Chair Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) said. “But let me be absolutely clear: There are forces working to take away the very tools of economic opportunity and freedoms that we have fought so hard to advance.”.

What was Bloody Sunday?

On March 7, 1965, more than 600 demonstrators gathered in Selma, Ala., to march from the Brown Chapel AME Church, the meeting headquarters for a voter registration campaign, to the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

These demonstrators were led by a young John R. Lewis, a Freedom Rider, founding member and chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a soon-to-be congressman.

A sea of Alabama state troopers led by the segregationist Selma sheriff, Jim Clark, met the demonstrators on the bridge, telling them to return to the church. After Lewis and the demonstrators stood firm, Clark told the troopers to advance.

“What we see is this horror of these marchers being violently attacked by the Alabama State Troopers on national TV, international news,” said Ryan Jones, associate curator and historian for the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn.

“You see John Lewis is clubbed in the head, there’s tear gas. The troopers are on horseback, so there were injuries of all sorts — no fatalities, thank God. But there were injuries all over the place.”

Cedric Haynes, vice president of policy and legislative affairs for the NAACP, said without Bloody Sunday, it’s unclear if President Lyndon B. Johnson ever would have signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“People in many parts of the nation had never seen the brutality that occurred to Black people in the South,” Haynes told The Hill. “That basically pushed then-President Johnson and legislators to ultimately introduce and pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

The lead-up to Bloody Sunday was months in the making, with the killing of a young Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson.

In February 1965, Jackson joined a group of demonstrators for a night march for voting rights in Marion, about 20 minutes west of Selma. The marchers were confronted by state troopers and Jackson was shot in the stomach. He died eight days later.

For Black leaders nearly 60 years later, the fight for voting rights remains a top-of-mind issue going into November.

The fight for voting rights today

In a meeting with reporters last month, Horsford said the Congressional Black Caucus is “concerned about the most fundamental institution within our democracy, which is our right to vote.”

Last year between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, at least 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws, though at least 356 restrictive bills were considered by lawmakers in 47 states, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.

One of the most restrictive laws came in North Carolina, where the period for returning mail-in ballots was shortened, ballot drop boxes were eliminated, and the likelihood that voters using same-day registration would not have their ballots counted increased.

Many advocates have highlighted the threat to voting rights because before the Voting Rights Act, Black voters who were unable to vote lived “in an environment in a climate that practices white supremacy,” said Jones, of the National Civil Rights Museum.

“This is a recycled process of the discriminations that certain individuals were forced to have to live under in that type of society [in 1965],” he said.

The Congressional Black Caucus has been pushing for the passage of the Freedom to Vote Act, a bill that would require all 50 states to offer early voting periods for at least two weeks prior to Election Day, including on nights and weekends, for at least 10 hours per day. It would also make mail-in voting easier by prohibiting certain requirements such as needing mail ballots to be notarized.

The caucus has also been a staunch supporter of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would expand the government’s ability to respond to voter discrimination.

“What we hope to hear from the president is that he will use the moment of the State of the Union and the anniversary of Bloody Sunday to lift up and to tie the fight for democracy, for voting rights, and the fight for economic justice together,” Horsford said. “And he is uniquely capable of, as he’s done in the past, using the moment to speak to the minds and hearts of the American people to explain this moment.”

Several organizations have sent an open letter to Biden calling on him to address voting rights Thursday.

“As you’ve made clear, anti-democratic forces are working to take away the freedom to vote, cause chaos in our electoral systems, and corruptly tilt our politics in favor of big money special interests,” the groups wrote. “No less than the future of our Republic is at stake.”

They are now demanding Biden publicly ask Congress to send him the Freedom to Vote Act and John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act for signature on the very first day of his next term — should he be reelected in November.

Haynes, of the NAACP who attended a meeting at the White House with Vice President Harris last week, said the administration has been doing all it can to protect the right to vote, though there remains a lot of work left in the fight.

Biden will have to highlight that to the nation Thursday, Haynes said.

“The message from the president has to be one where he recognizes that there are systemic problems that continue to exist and continue to plague our communities, but also there needs to be some substance there for him to restore our faith or create faith for us that they are doing what they can with the plan to address these issues to make some substantive outcome.”

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