Arkansans’ steps to echo marchers’

Tiffany Pettus wants to walk where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. walked.

She’ll get that opportunity this afternoon when she — and probably thousands of others — walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River at Selma.

“I think it’s important to go down to connect with history and to connect with the sacrifices so many others made for voting rights,” said Pettus, who lives in Little Rock. “We’re going to honor that persistence and that courage.”

Pettus is the executive assistant to DuShun Scarbrough, executive director of the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission.

A contingent from the commission drove to

Alabama this weekend for the Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee.

The annual event memorializes a March 7, 1965, voting-rights march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in which police and a posse beat black marchers with clubs and whips.

It was a turning point in the civil-rights movement as television beamed the images into American homes. The melee has come to be known as Bloody Sunday.

Two weeks later, on March 21, another group led by King marched over the bridge and resumed the originally planned 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery. Five days after that, the marchers arrived at the steps of the state Capitol, where King and others spoke to the crowd of about 25,000.

Scarbrough has been to the jubilee before. He attended in 2015 and was inspired to start a campaign to get young people in Arkansas to vote.

“It changed my life and it changed what I’m wanting to do in the state of Arkansas,” Scarbrough said. “Just the feeling of realizing that so many individuals take for granted the right to vote. People really felt passionate about this. You saw people crying. Civil-rights pioneers and trailblazers have died for this.”

In his mind’s eye, Scarbrough saw “trailblazers” and “foot soldiers” on U.S. 80 between Selma and Montgomery.

“As I drove the 50-mile stretch from Selma to Montgomery, I took for granted that I had the right to vote and to think, people literally walked 50 miles to Montgomery,” he said.

On Friday, Scarbrough said others from the commission made the trip this weekend to Selma. They included Diana Shelton, program coordinator; Walter L. Washington, finance officer; and Johnny Hasan, a commission coordinator.

They stopped in Marianna to pick up another commissioner, Elizabeth Johnson, who is superintendent of the Lee County School District.

Johnson said she has been to Montgomery and Birmingham, but not to Selma. She said 25 Lee County students will travel on a school bus to those three Alabama cities during spring break in mid-March. Johnson decided it was better for her to go to Selma this weekend instead of riding on the bus with the students.

“I think they would be able to enjoy it more without the superintendent looking over their shoulder,” she said.

Thunderstorms are forecast for Selma today. March organizers didn’t respond to emails and telephone messages asking if there is a contingency plan in the event of inclement weather.

“Rain or shine, we’re going,” Pettus said Thursday.

She said people from all over the world would be at the bridge “to relive that experience.”

U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ office confirmed that he would be there, although he’s not listed on the schedule of events at selma50.com. Lewis, D-Ga., was one of the march leaders on Bloody Sunday and suffered a concussion that day.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will speak at a pre-march rally at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, according to the schedule.

Scarbrough said the Selma bridge crossing is “symbolic of a transition.” He said it sets an example for the next generation of leaders who will carry on King’s legacy.

“As we prepare to enter an election year, we see the Selma trip as also an opportunity to re-energize Arkansans, especially young Arkansans who will turn 18 and become eligible to exercise their constitutional right to vote — which is the premise for this weekend’s events,” Scarbrough said.

He said the Arkansas commission contingent will participate in other events over the weekend and will meet with Charles Alphin Sr., a retired St. Louis police captain who was appointed by Coretta Scott King to work for the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

Alphin worked as a trainer in “Kingian nonviolence,” according to a short biography provided by the commission.

Martin Luther King used nonviolence in an effort to defeat injustice, according to the King Center in Atlanta.