Civil-rights leaders assessed their movement's progress as about 4,000 people re-enacted the historic voting-rights march to Montgomery and "Bloody Sunday" confrontation with police on a bridge 25 years ago.
"Lord knows we're not where we ought to be, but thank God we're not where we used to be," Hosea Williams said Sunday as he crossed Edmund Pettus bridge."We've come a long way. But Lord knows we've got a much further way to go," Williams said.
From that bridge, named for a confederate general, Williams on March 7, 1965, first saw the state and local police who ordered the marchers to disperse then used billy clubs and tear gas to chase them back across the bridge.
The day went down in civil-rights annals as Bloody Sunday.
About 300 people marched to a point four miles beyond the bridge and returned to Selma on Sunday night before resuming the 50-mile trek Monday morning. Marchers plan to arrive in Montgomery March 10 for a rally at the Alabama Capitol.
On Sunday, as marchers reached the midpoint of the bridge, smoke was released simulating tear gas. Marchers retreated, some falling to the ground.
Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., were among participants Sunday. Also marching were Albert Turner, F.D. Reese and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who were among those attacked on Bloody Sunday.
Jackson told about 600 people at First Baptist Church that King did not die and Nelson Mandela did not languish in a South African prison for 27 years for blacks not to exercise their right to vote.