Civil rights leaders gathered Thursday at the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery to pay their annual respects to the 40 martyrs killed at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the late U.S. Representative John Lewis.
The ceremony serves as both a powerful moment of reflection and an opportunity to recommit the community to civil rights and the continued work of advancing a more just and equitable society.
“The Deep South of Today is not the Deep South of the 50s and 60s, yet there are elected officials across the region who are determined to reverse decades of progress by suppressing our votes—whether it’s redrawing congressional maps to limit the representation of Black and brown voters, closing polling places to make it harder for people to vote. or using fear and intimidation to keep people at home on Election Day,” said Karen Baynes-Dunning, chair of the board of directors for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“The goal of these officials is clear: to heard their power and shut the rest of us out of the political process.”
The ceremony this year aligns with a weekend of events commemorating the 61st anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery March memorialized as “Bloody Sunday,” which will culminate in Selma on Monday with a ceremonial crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Civil rights leaders gathered Thursday at the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery to pay their annual respects to the 40 martyrs killed at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
“I stand before you this afternoon with humility and gratitude, knowing the history of Bloody Sunday and Selma and the sacrifices made by so many freedom fighters and foot soldiers so that we can gather now at this moment without a whip on our backs, a heel on our necks or dogs tearing at our flesh,” said Bryan Fair, interim SPLC president and CEO.
Fair recalled the words of the Reverend Theodore Parker, and later popularized by Martin Luther King Jr., that the “arc of the moral universe bends towards justice,” and offered a different perspective.
“For me, our history reveals that the of the moral universe bends as directed,” Fair said. “We collectively in coalition must build and bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice; to resist all of those in and out of government who have, for generations, bent it to favor themselves with unearned privileges.”
The ceremony concluded with the laying of the wreath on the fountain that welcomes visitors to the memorial center, where the names of the 40 martyrs honored at the ceremony are etched just below the cool running water.
Civil rights leaders gathered Thursday at the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery to pay their annual respects to the 40 martyrs killed at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
