Gloucester County Family Marches Alongside Thousands In Selma For 50th Anniversary Of "Bloody Sunday"
By Cherri Gregg
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A Gloucester County, New Jersey family is spending today in Selma, Alabama along with President Obama and civil rights leaders to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery "Bloody Sunday" march.
Herman Winters III is the great-nephew of Amelia Boynton Robinson, one of the few Blacks registered to vote in Alabama in 1965. She helped organize the Selma march alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and attempted to take the walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. But what happened that day changed the course of the voting rights movement.
"She said she would probably have just been another Black child left on the side if she hadn't been beaten and left for dead," says Winters, "it changed the course of her life."
The photo of Boynton, beaten unconscious by Alabama police, went around the nation and became an iconic image of the African-American battle for voting rights. Fifty years later, Winters says his great-aunt is 103-years-young, with a sharp mind and memory, and she'll make the trek back to Selma to participate in the commemorative march. She personally invited Winters, his wife Loretta, who runs the Gloucester County NAACP and their family to participate.
"It's truly an honor," says Loretta Winters, "just to be near someone with so much courage-- all of them, they put their life on the line for what they believed in."
Herman Winters says-- his brother and eight-year-old granddaughter will also be part of the celebration.
"To have four generations there...you don't get to do that often," he says, "I've told my granddaughter-- her commission is 50 years from now to be a part of the 100th anniversary and be a part of that living history."
