MONTGOMERY, Ala. – In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated for voting rights, facing brutal violence from Alabama state troopers. Two weeks later, they returned to complete their march, this time under federal protection. Among those inspired by this pivotal moment was Keith Odom, who was just a toddler at the time.
Now, at 62 years old, Odom, a union man and grandfather of three, retraced a portion of their journey. On Saturday, he traveled from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, joining fellow activists on two buses bound for Montgomery. Upon arrival, he stepped off his bus onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded.
“The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” Odom shared, his voice trailing off as he gazed at the Alabama Capitol and the stage where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the historic march.
However, Odom and his fellow travelers were not merely commemorating a historic day; they were renewing the fight for voting rights. The 1965 march played a crucial role in prompting Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which secured and expanded political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for decades.
The rally, dubbed “All Roads Lead to the South,” marked the first significant organizing response following a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act. The court’s decision to strike down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, based on a 6-3 ruling that deemed race-based political districting discriminatory, has led several states, including Alabama, to redraw U.S. House districts in ways that hinder Black voters from electing representatives of their choice.
“I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom stated firmly. “I want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”
An Old Political Battle Revisited
The atmosphere on the buses to Montgomery echoed with the sentiments of both past and present struggles for civil rights.
“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” said Justice Washington, a student at Kennesaw State University. Her family has always believed in the American system. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”
No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act was enacted. The youngest participant was born in the year Democrat Barack Obama was elected as the first Black president in 2008.
Kobe Chernushin, an 18-year-old white high school graduate from Atlanta’s northern suburbs, joined the rally as an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition. He spent the day documenting the event for social media followers. “I believe in the power of showing up,” he remarked.
The buses departed from the congressional district once represented by the late John Lewis, who was bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the original march in 1965. Although Lewis passed away in 2020, rally attendees celebrated a proposed federal election overhaul named in his honor. If passed, the bill could override the Supreme Court’s ruling, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act, and curtail the gerrymandering tactics that have emerged in recent years.
Generational Connections and Shared Stories
Montgomery has long been recognized as a cradle of both the Confederacy and the modern Civil Rights Movement.
“It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress, then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were,” reflected Phi Nguyen, a civil rights lawyer and the daughter of Vietnamese refugees.
Nguyen stood near the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, not far from where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the president of the Confederacy in 1861.
Alongside her sister Bee, who once served in the Georgia General Assembly, they engaged in conversation with two lifelong friends, Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford, both 72 and residents of Montgomery. Their friendship dates back to their days in a segregated junior high school. “I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford asserted. “It was never real integration.”
Burton described their experiences as being “in the second wave” of Black students entering newly desegregated schools. “It wasn’t easy,” she recounted. “And we had to support each other.”
They shared memories of parents who were unable to vote due to poll taxes and literacy tests, restrictions that the Voting Rights Act ultimately abolished. Yet, as they exchanged stories, smiles broke out, highlighting the connection between their journeys and those of younger generations.
Burton emphasized the commonality of struggles among marginalized groups: “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us. They’ve never fully lived up to it.”
Conflicting Legacies of Representation
For Odom, who set out from South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court’s stance reinforces a troubling history by failing to acknowledge race-conscious election policies as essential for fair representation, rather than merely a technical right to vote.
He recalled a lifetime spent under the representation of Strom Thurmond, a segregationist who transitioned from the Democratic Party to a Republican senator. Odom expressed concern that redistricting could lead to the loss of U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a prominent figure in the Congressional Black Caucus.
