ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 11, 1990                   TAG: 9003112568
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MONTGOMERY, ALA.                                 LENGTH: Medium


SELMA MARCH PLANNERS SEEK AGE OF ACTIVISM

The re-enactment of the historic, 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery ended Saturday with 3,000 people gathered in the shadow of Alabama's Capitol to rekindle the spirit of the civil rights movement.

The turnout paled in comparison to the 1965 march, when 25,000 people gathered in "the Cradle of the Confederacy" to demand voting rights, but organizers hoped the 1990 trek would herald a new age of activism.

"It would be a shameful waste if we marched all the way from Selma to Montgomery to go home and sit on our seats of apathy," said Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who led the week-long, commemorative march.

At the Capitol, where the Confederate battle flag still flies over the white dome despite blacks' protests, Jesse Jackson told the chanting crowd their message must be taken to the nation's capital.

Coretta Scott King encouraged the mostly black crowd to keep fighting for racial equality.

"These are the faithful few, and God always uses those who are willing to be used," said the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

The rally capped a week in which about 150 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and headed east along a rural highway to Montgomery, covering the same path activists took in 1965.

The march 25 years ago came two weeks after "Bloody Sunday," when white authorities routed black marchers with clubs and tear gas as they tried to cross the bridge over the Alabama River.

The violence at Selma was recorded by television cameras and helped spur Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed ballot-box rights for blacks.

James P. Turner, an acting assistant attorney general in the civil rights division of the Justice Department, said the law's effect was almost immediate. In Alabama alone, he said, black voter registration increased from about 92,000 in 1964 to nearly 250,000 in 1967.

"Nationwide, the number of black elected officials has leaped from 103 in 1964 to 7,226 today," Turner told the rally.

Lowery said blacks must reclaim values of the civil rights era that some have lost en route to 1990. "We crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge but now we've got to cross the rivers of apathy and loss of self-esteem," he said.



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