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

DATE: MONDAY, March 5, 1990                   TAG: 9003051959
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SELMA, ALA.                                 LENGTH: Medium

SELMA CONFONTATION RE-ENACTED

Four thousand people set out Sunday on a 25th anniversary re-enactment of a historic voting-rights march to Montgomery, including a replay of a bloody confrontation with police on a bridge.

The group returning to the Edmund Pettus Bridge was led by such civil-rights figures as Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott King. Among them were some of the original marchers, including U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Albert Turner and F.D. Reese.

"We shed a little blood here that made a difference. People are now registering to vote," said Lewis, D-Ga.

Halfway up the bridge Sunday, smoke was released to simulate police tear gas and marchers two abreast retreated, some falling to the ground.

On March 7, 1965, on the day remembered in civil rights annals as Bloody Sunday, police used billy clubs and tear gas to turn back hundreds of marchers on the bridge named for a Confederate general.

"Lord knows we're not where we ought to be, but thank God we're not where we used to be," Williams said as he crossed the bridge. "We've come a long way. But Lord knows we've got a much further way to go."

The 50-mile march will continue in segments each day through the week before culminating with a rally Saturday at the Alabama Capitol. After crossing the bridge, most of the crowd turned back to Selma, leaving several hundred to continue toward Montgomery, police said.

Jackson, speaking earlier Sunday from the First Baptist Church pulpit to about 600 people, said Martin Luther King Jr. did not die and Nelson Mandela did not languish in a South African prison for 27 years for blacks not to exercise their right to vote.

"You cannot walk around here with these unused blessings," Jackson said, adding that 35 percent of all blacks eligible to vote are unregistered. "God has given us all these votes. When you drop them they become snakes and go to Washington and bite us."

The law lowered voting barriers to blacks across the South and eventually led to a sharp increase in the number of both black voters and black officeholders.

by CNB