On this day 60 years ago, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. Its protections have been rolled back in recent years — and our fundamentally undemocratic Constitution is to blame.

On March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights activists departed from Selma headed toward Montgomery, Alabama, along US Route 80. The march, part of a larger voting rights movement taking place across the South, was led by twenty-five-year-old John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Rev. Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Everything went according to plan until the marchers — many of them residents of Selma, joined by clergy, students, and national movement organizers — crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they encountered a wall of Alabama state

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