by Jesse Jackson

Chicago Sun Times

3/1/2005

This weekend in Selma, Ala., marchers will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in that city. The violence unleashed by Southern sheriffs and racial vigilantes on that day galvanized President Johnson to push through the Voting Rights Act, giving blacks the right to vote in the South for the first time since the brief reconstruction period after the Civil War.

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