WATERLOO — Larry Stumme was in Selma, Alabama, on March 9, 1965, marching with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis on what grew to become often known as “Turnaround Tuesday.”
It was the second of three marches that ultimately culminated in a Selma-to-Montgomery march and the signing later that yr of the Voting Rights Act.
Stumme was proud to see civil disobedience result in “the best legislation,” he stated, that outlawed discriminatory voting practices like literacy exams that had been utilized by Southern states to forestall Black individuals from voting.
However now, Stumme sees the previous repeating itself within the type of a number of Republican-led states passing legal guidelines to restrict voting as soon as once more.
“That rigidity that was again in ’65 is alive right now in 2021,” Stumme instructed a crowd of some dozen gathered at Lincoln Park in Waterloo on Thursday night, encouraging them to analysis the federal For the Individuals Act, which he stated would undo these legal guidelines.
A number of audio system on the annual Voting Rights March, which commemorates the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, warned the woes of 56 years in the past are coming again round. However they’re additionally inspiring a brand new era to battle again.
“It’s ever extra necessary right now because it was 50 years in the past, because it was 100 years in the past, to battle issues like this,” stated Nilvia Reyes Rodriguez, the Waterloo chapter president of the League of United Latin American Residents.
