We went back to Selma, Alabama, this year—not as dignitaries or guests at a ceremony, but as inheritors of an unfinished revolution. And we did not go alone. We brought a new generation: organizers from Latino, Somali, Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian communities. Many of them had just watched armed, masked ICE agents surge through their neighborhoods in Illinois and Minnesota. Just like the students of 1965, they came to Selma to stand up, to speak out, and to demand that America finally become what it has always promised to be.

It was a reminder that this is not just history. This is now.

In 1965, ordinary people walked out of Brown Chapel AME Church and onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge, asking for one fundamental thing: to be seen. To be counted. To be treated as full citizens in their own country. They carried no weapons. They stormed no capitol. They carried faith, dignity, and a demand as old as the republic itself: the right to vote. For this, they were met with tear gas, whips, and clubs. John Lewis’s skull was fractured not because he broke the law, but because he dared to insist that the law finally apply to Black people.

Out of the blood on that bridge came two of the most transformative laws in American history: the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The VRA didn’t just change rules—it changed who could have power. It forced states with long histories of racist voter suppression to get federal approval before changing their election laws. It gave communities real tools to fight racial gerrymanders, at-large schemes, and the thousand quiet tricks designed to make sure Black and brown voters could be counted but never truly count. Voter registration soared. New voices, new leaders, new possibilities emerged.

Simultaneously, the Immigration and Nationality Act dismantled the racial hierarchy baked into American immigration law, ending the national-origin quota system that favored immigrants from Northern Europe.

What was born on that bridge was a new definition of who gets to be an American. But the forces that tried to stop those marchers in 1965 never disappeared. They adapted. They learned to wield paperwork instead of nightsticks. And today, they are back.

Current Issue

September 2026 Issue

The Trump administration has surged unprecedented numbers of immigration agents into Democratic states and communities of color. The Justice Department executed a sweeping raid on Fulton County, Georgia—seizing 2020 ballots and voter rolls—to relitigate a settled election and chill every future one. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that amounted to a ransom note: Hand over the complete, unredacted voter rolls or your communities will keep living under siege.

This is not law enforcement. It is intimidation, power dressed up as process.

The Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision had already gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance system, tearing out its spine and letting states with racist histories rewrite election rules without federal review. Voter-ID requirements, slashed voting hours, and gerrymandered maps drawn to dilute Black and brown political power have sprung up all over the country. Now Trump is pushing the SAVE Act, a “show your papers” law designed to block millions of eligible citizens who simply lack the right government-issued documents, all to solve a noncitizen-voting problem that does not exist. Pending Supreme Court cases threaten to gut the VRA even further. Together, these tactics form a coordinated assault on the very idea of multiracial democracy. We recognize it because we have seen it before. Although the methods are different, the intent is identical.

And as we reflect on Selma, we recognize that we are not mere observers of this history; we are products of it. One of us is the first Muslim elected to Congress and to statewide office, a reality made possible by Selma. The other grew up as the son of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, who marched from Selma to Montgomery and would become an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The bridge we crossed this year runs through our very lives. And the new generation crossing it—DREAMers and daughters of refugees, community organizers and first-time voters—are the continuation of Selma’s legacy.

Every tactic being deployed today is designed to do what Bull Connor’s clubs could not: to make people afraid to participate. To make democracy feel dangerous. But Selma teaches us something Bull Connor never understood: When you crack the skull of someone marching peacefully toward justice, you do not stop the movement. You become its fuel.

The students who marched in 1965 were fighting to be recognized as citizens with the right to vote. We are fighting to expand that recognition to everyone who calls this country home. The struggle is not behind us. It is right now, right here, unfolding in real time—and we are now the ones who must answer the call to action.