Selma Was Not Just History, It Was a Warning

Sixty-one years ago, on March 7, 1965, 600 people stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. They marched for the simple promise of democracy: the right to vote. What met them was not dialogue but violence — billy clubs, tear gas, mounted troopers. “Bloody Sunday” forced the nation to confront two truths: the brutality of racial discrimination and the power of coordinated Black organizing.

Selma was not only about ballots. It was about state power — and who it protects.

The marchers were protesting not just voter suppression, but the police killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black man shot by an Alabama state trooper while protecting his mother during a peaceful protest. His death exposed what Black communities already knew: when democracy threatens entrenched power, the state responds with force.

Today, we are again watching the machinery of state violence turn toward Black and Brown communities.

In Minneapolis this year, heavily armed federal agents carried out aggressive immigration raids, detaining residents and arresting protesters. For many, the images felt hauntingly familiar. This is the same city where, nearly six years ago, the murder of George Floyd sparked one of the largest racial justice uprisings in modern U.S. history. But Minneapolis is not an exception — it is part of a pattern.

Before George Floyd, there was Eric Garner, killed by police in New York City for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. His final words — “I can’t breathe” — echoed across the Brooklyn Bridge, where thousands marched demanding accountability. In 2015, when Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained in Baltimore police custody, protests erupted nationwide. The response? Five hundred state troopers and the Maryland National Guard deployed against largely young Black demonstrators.

The lesson is consistent. When Black communities demand dignity, the state escalates.

We saw it when National Guardsmen opened fire on students at Kent State in 1970. We see it now as protesters opposing “Stop Cop City” in Atlanta face sweeping felony charges for distributing flyers. Authoritarian governance does not only silence the most radical voices; it criminalizes solidarity itself. Reverend James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister who answered Dr. King’s call to march in Selma, was beaten to death for standing alongside Black Southerners. State violence does not stop at one community. It expands to anyone who challenges it.

Selma teaches us that bridges are more than structures. They are battlegrounds between repression and possibility.

The Brooklyn Bridge became a site of resistance after Eric Garner’s killing. The Hennepin Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis filled with tens of thousands days after George Floyd’s murder. These crossings symbolize something deeper: the act of moving from fear toward collective courage.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not materialize because power relented. It came because ordinary people risked their bodies, and organizations built legal, political, and grassroots strategies strong enough to force federal change.

That infrastructure matters.

In 1965, the Legal Defense Fund helped secure the right to march from Selma to Montgomery and provided legal defense for those arrested. Today, LDF is once again in court defending civil rights protections, challenging unlawful federal overreach, and supporting organizers confronting aggressive immigration enforcement and attacks on protest rights. Mutual aid networks, legal observers, faith leaders, and movement lawyers are coordinating across cities — not unlike the coalitions that made Selma possible.

But we should be clear-eyed about the stakes.

Authoritarianism does not always announce itself with tanks in the streets. It arrives through selective prosecution, expanded surveillance, the militarization of local police, and the normalization of cruelty against marginalized communities. It thrives when dissent is framed as disorder and when protest is treated as criminality.

Selma was both a moral reckoning and a strategic breakthrough. It reminds us that repression is not evidence of failure — it is often proof that movements are disrupting entrenched power.

As we commemorate Bloody Sunday’s 61st anniversary, we do so not as spectators of history but as participants in its next chapter. The question is not whether we will face resistance. We will. The question is whether we will build the durable coalitions — Black, immigrant, working-class, multiracial — capable of turning repression into reform once again.

The bridge in Selma still stands. So do the bridges in Minneapolis, New York, Baltimore, and Atlanta.

History suggests that when ordinary people cross them together, democracy expands.

And when they do not, authoritarianism does.

The choice, as it was in 1965, is ours.

Tre’ Murphy, is the Director community organizing Legal Defense Fund.