This March, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when voting rights leader John Lewis of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was beaten nearly to death by cops and Klansmen on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.  

The youngest marcher, Lynda Blackmon Lowery, was beaten so badly she was put in a hearse to take to the morgue.

But when the unconscious Lynda woke up in the hearse, she jumped up, ran out, and ran straight across the bridge into the teargas and Klansmen.

I want you to listen to her story taken from my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.   Video here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wwlq23kqEU&mc_cid=45b3cf00c6&mc_eid=579...

I’d like you to listen to Lynda for two reasons: first, to know our history, and unfortunately, possibly, horribly, our future. Trump’s executive order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” issued March 25, is the most vicious Jim Crow order America has seen since segregation, since the 1965 march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

How to defeat the forces that would watch democracy bleed to death and applaud? The same way we defeated the same Jim Crow forces 60 years ago:

• Marching

• Voting

• Voting

• Registering

• Voting

• Voting

• Re-registering

• And then marching to protect that vote.

• Repeat

Though the first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, on March 7, 1965, ended when state troopers and Klansmen attacked the 600 unarmed voting rights activists, when Martin Luther King, Jr. led the march over the bridge once again, on March 21, this time, the marchers did not stop for 50 miles until they reached to the state capital, Montgomery. And by the time they got there, President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act, considered an impossible feat just weeks before.

On March 25, 1965, King spoke to the world from the steps of the Capitol building. (Trump clearly picked the 60th Anniversary of King’s historic speech to issue his Order cutting the heart out of voting rights.)

King told the triumphant crowd, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Hank Sanders, who as a student was there with King, added, “The arc of justice does not bend by itself. That’s why I walk across the Pettus Bridge every chance I get.” Sanders, a lawyer whose parents could not vote in 1965, now represents Selma in the state legislature.

Sanders insisted I join him walking across the bridge with another young marcher of 1965, Marcia Edwards.  Marcia sang, “We Shall Overcome.”

Blackmon Lowery told me that King, joining her church choir in the song, told the congregation that we SHALL overcome, not “we will only overcome if it’s easy, if it’s safe.”  

Crossing the bridge with Sen. Sanders and Edwards, we didn’t face tear gas nor police beatings. In fact, the state police cleared the bridge for us. Who says there is no progress?

But we cannot take progress for granted. Indeed, right now I feel like we are marching backwards over the bridge. I’ve explained that vote suppression cost Kamala Harris some 3 million votes in the last election, and thereby the presidency. And with new laws allowing the return of Ku Klux Klan voter challenges, with literally millions of voters who will be purged from voter rolls this year, the issue of Voting Rights must be our first, second, and third priorities.

As Sen. Sanders says, “Voting impacts everything in our lives. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the work we do. The right to vote will always be under attack. When we march, we go forward. When we stop marching, we go backward.”

Above: Greg Palast, Lynda Blackmon Lowery and Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders (D-Selma) walk the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL. (Still from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy).

The Palast Investigative Fund is embarking on a new series of investigations, working with the legal and action teams at the NAACP of Georgia, Black Voters Matter Fund, and Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH organization to block the new Trump Crow attacks.

We have work to do. As Lynda Blackmon Lowery told me, two weeks after Bloody Sunday, King asked a Selma church group, “Who will walk with me?”

The adult congregants, who’d just been beaten and arrested, were in no mood to do it again. But the children stood up and filed out to lead the march. And their parents followed.

So, now I’m asking you, “Who will walk with spirit of Dr. King over that spiritual bridge?

The answer must be: you and me. Because in the end, there is no one else.

In the meantime, please watch The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the post-election edition, for no charge.