'Bloody Sunday' 60th Anniversary marked in Selma with remembrances and concerns about the future

Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights marchers walking in pairs across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965.

- Kim Chandler and Safiyah Riddle

The marchers were protesting white officials' refusal to allow Black Alabamians to register to vote, as well as the killing days earlier of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a minister and voting rights organizer who was shot by a state trooper in nearby Marion.

At the apex of the span over the Alabama River, they saw what awaited them: a line of state troopers, deputies, and men on horseback. They kept going. After they approached, law enforcement gave a two-minute warning to disperse and then unleashed violence.

"Within about a minute or a half, they took their billy clubs, holding it on both ends, began to push us back to back us in, and then they began to beat men, women, and children, and tear gas men, women and children, and cattle prod men, women, and children viciously," said Mauldin, who was 17 at the time.

Selma on Sunday marked the 60th anniversary of the clash that became known as Bloody Sunday. The attack shocked the nation and galvanized support for the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965. The annual commemoration pays homage to those who fought to secure voting rights for Black Americans and brought calls to recommit to the fight for equality.