SELMA, Ala. — Photographer: Janyla Weaver
Writer & Editor: Chevelle Shepherd
Writer & Reporter: Lydia Vergara
This past November, students from Kennedy High School in Waterbury were fortunate enough to travel to Alabama to participate in a Granville Academy six day civil rights and college tour.
This trip gave students new insight into one of the most tumultuous times in our nation’s history. For those of us who participated in this trip, we have come to understand the civil rights movement as a time of remarkable change and its leaders as people with unrivaled courage and a fierce determination and commitment to the creed that all men are created equal.
On September 15, 1963, the church service was interrupted by a bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four innocent African-American girls lost their lives. At least 14 others were injured in the explosion.
Three former Ku Klux Klan members were eventually convicted of murder for the bombing.
On March 7, 1965, Civil Rights advocates marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
This bridge is a national landmark of what happened on this horrible day. called Bloody Sunday, which included the beatings of many African Americans, because they were fighting for their right to vote.
We are now allowed to walk across this memorable bridge without going through the horror of those brave men and women.
