Selma march not a reenactment but a recommitment to voting rights

Contact: Martha Waggoner | mwaggoner@breachrepairers.org 

Selma recommitment to voting rights includes Poor People’s Campaign, Rainbow PUSH & Transformative Justice 

Groups will lead Monday leg of recommitment march from Selma-to-Montgomery 

Three social justice groups – the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the Transformative Justice Coalition – will lead the Monday leg of the Selma-to-Montgomery march in a recommitment to voting rights. 

The three groups – along with the co-sponsors of the PPC:NCMR, Repairers of the Breach and the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice – will take the baton on Monday, March 7, in a march that begins at 9 a.m. CT.

They and their allies will march 11 miles to symbolize the recommitment to the urgent fight for voting rights in an era when voters have less access to the ballot box than they did when the marchers in the original Selma march in 1965 were beaten and tear-gassed on what became known as Bloody Sunday. 

The three groups will be led by: Bishop William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the PPC:NCMR; Rev. Jesse Jackson, president and founder of Rainbow PUSH and attorney Barbara Arnwine, president and founder of Transformative Justice. 

Bishop Barber also is president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and Rev. Dr. Theoharis is director of the Kairos Center. These two organizations are co-sponsors of the PPC:NCMR, which holds that voting rights are not just Black issue but an issue that hurts all poor and low-wealth voters in the US. 

For the PPC:NCMR, the march is another step on the way to the Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls on June 18th. The assembly and march will be not just a day of action but a declaration of an ongoing, committed moral movement to not just voting rights but also against poverty and for living wages, the right for workers to form and join unions and health care because the same politicians who oppose voting rights also oppose these other issues. 

On Sunday, Bishop Barber and Rev. Dr. Theoharis will be among the leaders joining Vice President Kamala Harris in a march over Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the brutal Bloody Sunday beatings on March 7, 1965, during this first march for voting rights. 

Also joining them will be Elliott Smith, co-director of student mobilization for the PPC:NCMR, whose great-aunt was civil rights matriarch Amelia Boyton. Ms. Boynton was brutally attacked by sheriff’s deputies as she joined 
Also on Sunday, Bishop Barber will preach at Tabernacle Baptist Church, the site of the first mass meeting of the voting rights movement.