On Saturday, May 16, 2026, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, once again became the site of a fight for Black voting rights. Decades after marches that helped secure these privileges for Black Americans, activists and advocates showed up to protest recent redistricting efforts by southern Republican state legislatures. The mobilization, organized under All Roads Lead to the South, is challenging the April 2026 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. The new ruling is detrimental, considering it poses a threat to majority-Black voting districts across the South by undermining minority representation.
While organizers called it a National Day of Action, the movement kick-started a summer of organizing through mobilization, civic education, legal advocacy, and direct action. The goal is to ensure our voting rights are protected before election time.
Rev. Dr. Bernice A. King, CEO of The King Center and daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, understands our current plight intimately. Consequently, the 63-year-old returned to the very grounds where her parents ignited change and led protest efforts, which is symbolic in myriad ways.
ESSENCE sat down with King to discuss what it means to return to Selma and Montgomery under circumstances that may feel painfully familiar. At a time when voting rights are once again under scrutiny across the South, she is urging communities to move beyond news cycles and toward sustained, strategic organizing. King shares why this moment may be more dangerous than people realize, how organizers can sustain the movement for the long term, and opens up about where she finds hope.
ESSENCE: What does it mean to you personally to return to Montgomery and Selma? The same ground your parents and so many of the ancestors walked and sacrificed on?
Rev. Dr. Bernice King: Well, you know, in some ways it’s sad. I’m disappointed to have to come back for a similar reason. And the reason I say similar is because we’re in a different position than they were.
They were fighting to make sure that we could register without being attacked and beaten, and having all of these different barriers to grandfather clauses and things of that nature. Poll taxes. But we come back in a different way. We have a greater political strength, even though there’s an attempt to undermine that. So on the one hand, while I’m sad, I’m not shocked because my mother always said struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation, signaling that evil forces, people who always want to undermine and oppress and exploit, are going to be out there. And we have to be vigilant about not just organizing, but staying organized, staying connected, staying coordinated. And so I’m encouraged by being here today to see a new generation stand in strength and power and truth, and with a determination to make this not just a moment in Montgomery, but to really move forward from here together. I’ve been in some meetings, and so I’m encouraged. I’m praying through this time that we understand how critically important it is for us not to demobilize and then try to mobilize again. We really create a strong infrastructure through this process.
We’re seeing renewed attacks on voting rights across the South. Can you speak to the seriousness of this threat and what’s at stake if we don’t respond?
Well, if we don’t respond, the people who did it will feel like they can keep doing it. And so you always have to shine a light on darkness, kind of like when you walk into a room and it’s dark, and the roaches start scattering [in the light] because they’ve been up to no good in your room or your kitchen. Our vigilance is important in this hour. And if we don’t show up in this election, then it’s going to be super tough going forward. We already saw the number of Black women who lost work, from corporate America, in the hundreds of thousands. We’ve seen what happened with SNAP benefits. We’ve seen what’s happening under the banner of D-E-I. But the interesting thing is when people come against us, there’s something in our DNA that gets resolved and finds a way to fight, and a strength, and finds a way through and out.
And so if we are passive in this moment or if we don’t show up in votes, then what’s happening now is going to quadruple, because the intent is to take us not just back to Jim Crow, but before Jim Crow. And so, especially for the next generation, this is a serious moment. This is nothing to play with, and we ought to know it. People have said it, but we have to keep saying it to people. Nobody would be doing this, trying to redraw lines in the middle of a primary, if your vote wasn’t important, if your vote didn’t make a difference. They believe that if we don’t vote, they’re going to be able to place more people in there so that they can’t continue to do what they’re doing, to attack. So we gotta vote. We’ve got to talk to our friends about voting, educating ourselves on the vote, so we know what we’re voting for, who we are voting for.
How do you keep people committed to a long game effort in a world that’s presently built for short attention spans?
I’m Christian. I’m a preacher. There’s a verse in the Bible that says, without a vision, the people will perish. There’s another part that says they cast off restraints. People need a vision.
They need to be able to see what we’re trying to do. They need an ultimate goal. And if we don’t articulate that for people, and if we don’t educate people and rally them around that, then their attention span will go on to the next thing. It has to be a vision that’s compelling, a vision that they can buy into. That connects with what’s happening in their life and their world. And then you put all the resources around that and make sure everybody has an assignment. Everybody has to have an assignment because a mouthpiece is not enough. That boycott in Montgomery couldn’t have happened if the women had not organized in that community to pass out flyers because the word had to get out.
Now you think the spokesperson is important, but you can be there in an empty crowd, or you can be one in an effort, and only a few people will rally around it and support it. So there’s a role for everybody, but we have to give them a vision that’s bigger than a moment. And I think that’s what’s missing now. And then have goals related to that so that we can say, okay, this is the big picture. These are the goals. We’ve done that. But now we’ve got to keep moving with this, this, this, and this.
What gives you hope right now?
What gives me hope is that people keep showing up from every generation. What gives me hope is that I know in my DNA the people who fought before, they overcame. And so we, too, will have something to draw from. I think about Harriet Tubman all the time because Harriet Tubman didn’t have a navigational system. But somehow, she got the freedom a long way away because she was tuned into God more importantly. She followed that divine navigational system. And so if she did that, there’s so much in us. So that gives me hope. And I have hope because I hear, for the first time, white people in numbers saying things in a very strong voice in support of our community. I’ve been on social media, and we don’t need to sleep on that. Now you might say, well, where were they five years ago, or four years ago, or last year? Whatever. Never mind that, because you don’t want to dismiss those who may have been voicing themselves but it may not have gotten out. But we have people who understand and connect to us as a people who know we are part of the human family. They are speaking up for their people. That gives me hope, too.
