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MONTGOMERY, Ala. — <\/span>In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated for voting rights<\/a> and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal protection. Keith Odom was a toddler then. <\/p>\n Now 62 years old, the union man and grandfather of three retraced some of their final steps<\/a>. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, where he joined several dozen other activists on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he stepped off his bus and onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded. <\/p>\n \u201cThe history here \u2014 being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,\u201d said Odom, who is Black. <\/p>\n His voice trailed off as he saw the Alabama Capitol and a stage that sat roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original march.<\/p>\n Odom lamented that he and his fellow bus riders were not simply commemorating that seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement<\/a>. Instead they came to renew the fight. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to send the Voting Rights Act<\/a> to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign<\/a>, securing and expanding political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.<\/p>\n Saturday\u2019s \u201cAll Roads Lead to the South\u201d rally was the first mass organizing response after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling<\/a> that severely diminished that landmark law.<\/a> Striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, the justices concluded in a 6-3 ruling<\/a> that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself discriminatory. That spurred multiple states, including Alabama<\/a>, to redraw U.S. House districts<\/a> in ways that make it harder for Black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect lawmakers of their choice.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not trying to live a life that\u2019s going backwards,\u201d Odom said. \u201cI want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.\u201d<\/p>\n The passenger rosters and the scene when riders arrived in Montgomery sounded the echoes and rhymes of past and present.<\/p>\n \u201cI talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,\u201d said Justice Washington, a Kennesaw State University student named because her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. \u201cMy grandmother told me she did her part, and now it\u2019s time for me to do mine.\u201d<\/p>\n No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008. <\/p>\n Kobe Chernushin is 18, white and just graduated high school in Atlanta\u2019s northern suburbs. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby, a 29-year-old executive for the organization, doing standups for the group\u2019s followers on social media.<\/p>\n \u201cI believe in the power of showing up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The buses launched from the congressional district in Georgia once represented by John Lewis<\/a>, bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge<\/a> in Selma, Alabama, when he was 25. Lewis died in 2020, but some on the buses Saturday celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is named for him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override the U.S. Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and outlaw the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald Trump has instigated.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he was a student,\u201d said Darrin Owens, 27. He has worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.<\/p>\n \u201cPolitical activism is personal,\u201d Owens said, explaining that he attended Saturday as a citizen, not a political professional. \u201cSometimes those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black person living in a Southern state, I\u2019m committed to action that stops what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person who represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.\u201d<\/p>\n When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on Montgomery\u2019s streets. A wounded, recovering Lewis did during the second march in 1965. <\/p>\n This time many of the Alabama troopers and local officers who walked the area were Black.<\/p>\n The buses and sandwich lunches had been arranged by Fair Fight Action, a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams<\/a>, who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.<\/p>\n At different points, Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress, then there\u2019s a huge backlash, and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were,\u201d said Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta.<\/p>\n She stood across from the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott<\/a> in 1955 and not far from where Jefferson Davis<\/a> took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending Confederate president.<\/p>\n Nguyen and her sister Bee, a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women as they walked. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old Montgomery residents who have been friends since they were in a segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t call it \u2018integration,\u2019\u201d Ashford said, pointing at her dark skin. \u201cIt was never real integration, and it\u2019s not like we can ever just blend in.\u201d<\/p>\n Burton described them as being \u201cin the second wave\u201d of Black students. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t easy,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we had to support each other.\u201d<\/p>\n They remember their parents not being able to vote in the era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed. But they smiled as they swapped family histories with the Nguyens.<\/p>\n Burton said immigrants, descendants of enslaved persons and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths. \u201cWe just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019ve never fully lived up to it.\u201d<\/p>\n To Odom, who had begun his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court reinforced that history by refusing to see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair representation, not simply the \u201ctechnical right to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n He recalls decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond<\/a>, a segregationist Democratic governor who became a \u201cDixiecrat\u201d presidential candidate and U.S. senator \u2014 by now as a Republican \u2014 into the 21st century. Odom said he fears his state losing U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn<\/a>, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, through redistricting<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cThey want to take away that legacy when we\u2019re still living with Strom\u2019s?\u201d Odom said.<\/p>\n Odom said he is also worried that the young people who participated Saturday are not a vanguard but outliers.<\/p>\n \u201cI was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,\u201d he said. \u201cShe told me she supported me but didn\u2019t want to do it or work for anybody\u201d running for office. \u201cShe wondered what any of them are going to do for her.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, he said on the way home, \u201cI\u2019m still going to tell her what I saw and what I heard.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n