It was Selma weather in NYC yesterday for the 50th Anniversary of the crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma, Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery in a historic campaign for voting rights. It was at that bridge where they met a blockade of troopers back in 1965 after a five day, 54 mile march.

The march was in direct response to the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson a month earlier. On February 18th, a 26-yr-old deacon from Marion was killed as he attempted to protect his mother from the blows of a state trooper’s nightstick. The activist march set out on March 7th while Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was still in Atlanta, Georgia.

The event on the Edmund Pettus Bridge immediately triggered national outrage as televised coverage of state troopers and local lawman, led by Sheriff Jim Clark and on the orders of Major John Cloud, ‘dispersed’ the crowd of peaceful marchers.

When the crowd wouldn’t budge, Cloud ordered his men to move in. Troopers attacked the marchers with nightsticks and teargas.

Hundreds, including former New York City Mayor David Dinkins, turned out for the last minute march yesterday put on by the Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams along with Norman Siegel, a prominent civil rights attorney, Dr. Karen Daughtry and Senator Jesse Hamilton D-NY.

Led by a bass and snare drum band, Adams, Siegel, Daughtry and Hamilton walked arm in arm across the entire length of the Brooklyn Bridge, stopping every so often for media to take photos, before moving on to Borough Hall in Brooklyn where everyone was let in to watch Obama in Selma give his speech to commemorate the fateful day 50 years prior.

“Selma is everywhere,” Attorney Norman Siegel told me prior to the march. “The racial injustice that occurred in Selma in 1965, unfortunately, is still present in various forms all across America including in New York City”.

“Equality for all, not for some”.