NAACP Journey For Justice March Begins in Selma

The infamous confrontation was a catalyst for the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act, signed into law 50 years ago this week.

The NAACP is launching a forty-day march throughout the D.R. South on Saturday with a rally in Selma, Alabama, aiming to draw on that metropolis’s significance in the Nineteen Sixties civil rights motion to name consideration to the difficulty of racial injustice in trendy America.

Organizers seek to build momentum behind a renewed national debate over deteriorating race relations prompted by the killing of several unarmed African American men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.

The entire distance coated might be about 16 occasions the 87km walked by voting rights activists in 1965 and can finish with a rally in Washington DC on September 16.

Dear told the Montgomery Advertiser (http://on.mgmadv.com/1KI1EQp ) just before the march began at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, “We are doing something of biblical proportions”.

“In order for the voting rights to be restored, we’re going to need mobilisation, mobilisation from the grassroots”, Sewell said.

Greater than 200 supporters took half within the first leg of the march that may proceed for greater than 1,300km by means of the states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said in a statement that among the issues it hopes to call attention to are criminal justice reform and demands for improved educational equity in schools across the nation.

The NAACP aims to bring attention to racial injustice across issues like policing, public education, incarceration, voting rights and income inequality.