Bridge Crossing Jubilee. What’s in a name? National Voting Rights Celebration. What’s in a name? Jimmie Lee Jackson Memorial Program. Selma-to-Montgomery March. Voting Rights Act. Edmund Pettus Bridge. What’s in a name?

The National Voting Rights Celebration began the third Sunday in February (Feb. 19) and concludes on the second Friday in March (March 9). In between these beginning and ending dates are lots of places, happenings and events. Each has a name. Each means something significant. Each symbolizes something special.

Voting rights have been so impactful on the United States of America and indeed the world. However, these rights did not come without great struggles and tremendous sacrifices. We must remember each struggle and draw lessons therefrom. That’s why the National Voting Rights Celebration looms so large, covers so many days and weeks and involves so many events. We celebrate to remember. We celebrate to learn. We celebrate to commit.

Why the third Sunday in February as a beginning of the celebration? Well, that’s the date of the Jimmie Lee Jackson Memorial Program in Marion. Lots of voting rights struggles and events preceded the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, but his death was pivotal in the modern day voting rights struggle.

An Alabama State Trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson in cold blood, and other troopers brutally beat him after he was shot; all this because he wanted to take his 80-plus-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, to a doctor. Lee had been hurt in a voting rights demonstration a little earlier that night. Jackson died on Feb. 18, 1965.

Black citizens of Perry County were so enraged by the killing they decided to march the 80 miles from Marion to Montgomery carrying Jimmie Lee’s dead body to protest his death and the denial of voting rights. All this and more is embodied in the name “Jimmie Lee Jackson Memorial Program.”

These determined citizens eventually decided not to march from Marion to Montgomery with Jimmie Lee’s body. Instead, they would march the 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery without the body since Jimmie Lee had been funeralized and buried. The attempt to march to Montgomery led to the Bloody Sunday tragedy where 550 marchers were brutally beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by local and state law enforcement.

The Bridge Crossing Jubilee celebrates these and other events. This year the Jubilee runs from Thursday, March 1 through Sunday, March 4 and includes 40-plus events. All this and more is embodied in the name “Bridge Crossing Jubilee.”

The events surrounding Bloody Sunday led to the Selma-to-Montgomery March after a protracted legal battle in Federal court. Three hundred people marched the entire 50 miles, but 25,000 were on hand for the end of the march. That’s why the 2012 reenactment of the Selma-to-Montgomery March entails a full march commencing in Selma on March 4 and concluding in Montgomery on Friday, March 9. It dramatizes the fact that voting rights, along with public education, workers’ rights, immigration and other areas of life are again under attack across this country. All this and more is embodied in the name “Selma-to-Montgomery March.”

All these and many other events led to enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Some say it was the most effective Federal legislation enacted in the history of this country. It certainly transformed the Deep South and indeed America. All that and more is embodied in the name “Voting Rights Act.”

We must never forget the voting rights struggle in this country has been long and incremental. Even the struggle for voting rights in the 60s was far wider and deeper than the Alabama Black Belt. Selma, Marion and the Alabama Black Belt were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We must remember that Mississippi and Georgia and South Carolina and Louisiana and other places, far and near, were sites of intense voting rights struggles. I wish I had the space to detail more of these struggles. Suffice it to say that they are many and significant.

What’s in the name National Voting Rights Celebration? All that I have written here and so much, much more. What’s in a name? Thousands of stories, told and untold. What’s in a name? Events and places that are world-renowned symbols such as the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the city of Selma. What’s in a name? Our past and our present and our future.

EPILOGUE – We hear so many names. Too often we don’t know what’s in the names. When we know, the names come alive and live in us.