Rodney King Beating Recalls
by: Dr. Clint Wilson
Although the two events were separated by 26 years, the brutal police attack on peaceful civil rights demonstrators marching from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. and the videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles caused many to question the extent of progress made in American race relations over that time frame.
The Baltimore Afro-American reported that Alabama State Troopers on horseback used whips, clubs and tear gas to attack a group of 600 persons who were engaged in a peaceful “walk for freedom” from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. The ill-fated event of Sunday, March 7, 1965 was organized to protest the denial of voting rights to Black citizens in Alabama and was witnessed and recorded by news reporters.
Gas, Whips, Clubs Bar Selma March
SELMA, Ala. (UPI) – State troopers and mounted sheriff’s deputies routed a “walk for freedom” by 600 persons Sunday, using clubs, whips, ropes and tear gas. Many were injured some apparently severely.
The galloping horsemen pursued some fleeing marchers almost a mile, back to their church meeting place clothing them with their billy clubs. The injured mostly with head wounds, streamed into Brown’s Chapel Church. Many of them were hysterical – sobbing and screaming. Others gasped for air and tried to wipe from their eyes the tear gas shot into the crowd shortly after the march was halted.
The injured included children, women and men. The posse rode their ...
1965 – Daisy Lampkin Dies Three days after the ill-fated march from Selma to Montgomery, the world was saddened by the death of civil rights pioneer Daisy E. Lampkin, an officer of the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women and ...
On March 6, 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision that effectively excluded Blacks from rights of citizenship under the Constitution. The ...
