SENATE RESOLUTION
8619
By Senators Lovick, Muzzall, Boehnke, Cleveland, Dhingra, Hansen, Hasegawa, Liias, Nobles, Orwall, Pedersen, Shewmake, Stanford, Valdez, J. Wilson, Cortes, King, Ramos, Salomon, Slatter, Trudeau, Conway, Fortunato, Kauffman, Torres, and Wagoner
WHEREAS, March 7, 2025, marks the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday; and
WHEREAS, Today, the people of Washington state join the nation in remembering Bloody Sunday; and
WHEREAS, After 35 years of organized violence to keep Negroes from the polls, the Alabama state legislature ratified a new constitution in 1901 that sought to disenfranchise Negro voters; and
WHEREAS, Hard-working activist Amelia Boynton Robinson cofounded the Dallas County Voters League in 1933 to register Negro citizens, resisting the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan and county officials, who restricted registration hours, threatened people's jobs, evicted folks from their homes, led boycotts of Negro-owned businesses, and committed violence against Negro people trying to register to vote; and
WHEREAS, James Orange organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was arrested along with 700 students and adults engaging in nonviolent protests, sparking a march to the Marion county courthouse in Alabama; and
WHEREAS, State officials were ordered to target the marchers, prompting Alabama state troopers to lie in wait, turn off streetlights, and ambush peaceful protesters; and
WHEREAS, An Alabama state trooper followed protester Jimmie Lee Jackson, his mother, and grandfather as they fled to safety, and shot and killed unarmed Jimmie Jackson, giving Negro leaders cause to march to the governor's doorstep; and
WHEREAS, On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, 600 unarmed people were beaten with billy clubs and baseball bats wrapped with barbed wire and sprayed with tear gas by law enforcement officers; and
WHEREAS, While 70 million people watched in dawning horror as protestors were run down by horses and brutalized by law enforcement officers, the nation was brought closer to consciousness, the sanitized reality of the North split open by the violent lived experience of Southern Blacks; and