Linda Lowery was just 14 years old in 1965 when she marched 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of voting rights.
She and several other Black teenagers were with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that day, taking it upon themselves to demonstrate for civil rights at a young age.
On Jan. 2, 1965, King spoke before 700 people at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which launched what is recognized now as the Selma Voting Rights Campaign. It was led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as they prepared to increase voter registration for Black people in the rural South and in America as a whole.
“Yes, I was [in the march] at 14. Dr. King had been to Selma numerous times, and the young people of Selma had been trained in the principles of nonviolence, starting with SNCC and Dr. Bernard Lafayette,” Lowery told HuffPost.
“SNCC had already been here training and encouraging young people to get involved in a nonviolent movement and training us on the principles of nonviolence.”
For Lowery, now 75, and others who protested in support of civil rights 60 years ago, there is a level of irony that Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration will take place Monday, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday. Many people across America cringed when Trump compared himself to King last August, while describing the large crowds of people he has spoken to at his campaign rallies.
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything — same number of people, if not we had more,” Trump said.
Trump’s odd comments on King were not limited to that.
He at one point last year referred to Republican Mark Robinson, the disgraced North Carolina gubernatorial nominee, as “Martin Luther King on steroids” in a speech.
“I told that to Mark, I think you are better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two.”
Trump’s actions and rhetoric have deeply offended people over the years. That perspective is especially true for Kirk Carrington, a Black man from Selma who also marched those 54 miles as a teenager.
Carrington was 16 at the time. He remembers the large number of teenagers and even younger kids participating in the civil rights movement years prior, and his opinion on Trump winning a second term is very simple: “America was not ready for a woman to be a president,” Carrington told HuffPost.
He mentioned that each time Trump won an election, he happened to be running against a woman: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024.
“Both women he beat were more qualified than he is,” Carrington said. “And the people he is surrounding himself with, they are not qualified. He wants incompetent people around him.”
When Carrington was growing up, America was a segregated nation. It was something he was born into as a child, dealing with racism. But now, Carrington says, racism comes in a different form.
Dianne Harris, who was 15 when she marched in Selma and now works as a civil rights historical tour guide, remembers when King was invited to her hometown, and she recalls how important many Black people in Selma thought it was for him to come.
Since Trump’s November election, Harris has been doing a lot of praying, she said. The devout Christian said America needs prayer and the country needs leaders who want to serve all the people, not just some.
Hearing Trump’s rhetoric and promises to change laws and policies, she said, she detects fear in his approach.
“It is ironic that the observation of MLK Day and the inauguration fall on the same day. However, I do feel that many Blacks and other people who believed in what Dr. King stood for and he was trying to be about the essence of civil rights and good for mankind — all those good things ― I think the momentum of us celebrating Dr. King’s birthday will not be diminished by the inauguration,” Harris told HuffPost.
“The voters have spoken. It may not be the choice that many of us chose, but the voters spoke. And we will deal with the cards that have been played.”
All three Selma marchers, Harris, Carrington and Lowery, wanted America to change for the better. But they believe that America has gotten to the point where it is now because there is still a level of hate in people’s hearts and that Trump is just a symbol of that hate.
Lowery remembers when she was 14, marching across the bridge, being chased by a Selma deputy and Alabama state trooper.
On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Lowery recalled, she ran into a crowd of tear gas and a man behind her struck her. She said she was kicked by a state trooper so hard that she rose off the ground from the impact. Lowery said she thinks she passed out as she was being beaten. When she woke up, she was on a stretcher being loaded into a hearse. She told the medics she was not dead and jumped off the stretcher.
“I let them know I was not dead and I was not getting into that hearse. And then I started running again,” Lowery told HuffPost.
Lowery can still remember many of the officers’ faces, saying the brave children of Birmingham and Selma “put the word ‘unity’ back into ‘community’” as they faced the threat of violence from law enforcement in the Jim Crow era.
She likened the looks of the men’s faces as they were beating her that day to the viral images and video of a white police officer in Minneapolis as he knelt on the neck of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, killing the Black man on the street.
“It was the same look that Derek Chauvin had on his face when he so arrogantly looked into the camera as he had his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck. And it was 55 years between the two incidents. And I could not see where anything we had done had made a difference in the hearts of people,” Lowery said.
“There has always been some cosmetic change, and that was it. It didn’t change people’s hearts. It has not changed, and that is the hurting part. People gave their lives to make a change, and the only difference it made was painted over, it was cosmetic.”