#TalkRadio – September 23: Celebrating the Igniters of Change! TJC 10th Anniversary Reception, Leaders of the New National Christian Leadership Movement, Young Voices of Changes

INTRODUCTION:

Hi Igniters For Change! The Igniting Change Radio Show on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025, from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Eastern Time, entitled “Celebrating the Igniters of Change! TJC 10th Anniversary Reception, Leaders of the New National Christian Leadership Movement, Young Voices of Changes”, will be live with Radio Show Co-Hosts and Transformative Justice Coalition (TJC) Co-Leaders Attorneys Barbara Arnwine, Esq. and Daryl Jones, Esq. and will feature special guests Kathy Sykes; Rodreshia Russaw; Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow; Dr. Kylar Wiltz; Lamair Bryan; and, Johnnie Brooker III. This year marks several important anniversaries including the 70th Anniversary of the Montgomery Boycott, the 60th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 60th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 10th Anniversary of the Transformative Justice Coalition!

Ongoing Igniting Change Updates:

• FREE DC: https://freedcproject.org/occupation We need to do two things right now DC: keep each other safe, and actively work to end the takeover. Here are actions, resources, and events to help do that. Residents can visit the new website and: make calls, get visible, make noise every night at 7:00 PM, hold morning and afternoon support, make a pledge to travel together, adopt a curfew zone, and become a legal monitor with Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. There are also actions for allies nationwide and specific actions for allies in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Ohio, and South Carolina.

• September 17th, 2025: “Federal judge overturns part of Florida’s book ban law, drawing on nearly 100 years of precedent protecting First Amendment access to ideas” https://theconversation.com/federal-judge-overturns-part-of-floridas-book-ban-law-drawing-on-nearly-100-years-of-precedent-protecting-first-amendment-access-to-ideas-263893

This week’s show:

Our show is designed to recognize these milestone anniversaries while celebrating the launch of new leadership formations including the recent Installation of Leaders for the New National Christian Leadership Movement (NNCLM) on September 18th in Hammond, Louisiana. The Role of the Black Church in the fight for democracy has been a constant theme explored throughout the years on the Igniting Change Radio Show.  We will hear directly from its new installed leadership: Dr. Kenneth Glasgow, President of the NNCLM, Representative Kathy Sykes, National Chair of the Board of the NNCLM, and Rodreshia Russaw, Treasurer of NNCLM. They will share perspectives regarding how this new organization of 2,500 African American churches is seeking to reorder the engagement of these religious institutions during this age of White Christian Nationalism and the Trump Administration.

This week also marks the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Weekend. The Transformative Justice Coalition will be sponsoring 2 major events: “It Ain’t Over” TJC’s 10th Anniversary Reception Honoring the Foot Soldiers of Bloody Sunday on Wednesday, September 24th, 4:00-7:00 PM ET, Hosted by A. Scott Bolden and Reed Smith LLP, 1301 K Street, Washington, DC. During this program, we will hear from the 1965 Foot Soldiers and from new Gen Z and Young Millennial Leaders including Dr. Kyler Wiltz, Lamair Bryan and Johnnie Brooker III.

The second event sponsored by TJC this week will be on Saturday, September 27th from 9:30 AM – 1:30 PM entitled “Do Something! Emerging Leaders’ Summit” hosted with the National Urban League (NUL).

A Little History: Bloody Sunday and TJC Honors the Foot Soldiers

“After the March on Washington, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act became law. However, this did not make it easier for African Americans to vote in the South.” “In 1964, John Lewis coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer.”  “SNCC supported the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in an effort to challenge the legitimacy of the state’s all-white Democratic Party.”

SNCC “had been trying to register voters in Selma since 1963. They hadn’t gotten very far. At the time of the march, only 383 of the 15,000 black residents in Selma’s Dallas County were registered to vote. At 25, [John] Lewis had already been arrested twenty times by white segregationists and badly beaten during Freedom Rides in South Carolina and Montgomery.” “The movement came to a head in the early part of 1965 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to Selma.”

“Fellow activist Andrew Young…explained to the Michigan Chronicle, [that Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson] approached Dr. Martin Luther King ‘just before Christmas in 1964 and said, ‘You need to come and help us in Selma,’ and that is where the Selma movement started.’ She inspired King and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to take action in Selma.”

“In January 1965, while leading a voters’ drive at the courthouse in Selma, Mrs. Boynton Robinson was charged with ‘criminal provocation’ and was arrested by the county’s notoriously race-baiting sheriff, Jim Clark. ‘When she refused to leave the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, Sheriff Clark grabbed her by the back of her collar and pushed her roughly and swiftly for half a block into a patrol car,’ the New York Times reported. King, who was watching from across the street, immediately went to officials of the Justice Department to demand a court injunction against the sheriff. ‘It was one of the most brutal and unlawful acts I have seen an officer commit,’ King said at the time.”

“[King came] came the first week in January to speak at a mass meeting. Several hundred people came out to the rally…A few weeks later, police ambushed a nighttime march to the courthouse in Marion, Alabama. The streetlights were shot out and the beating began. A young Vietnam War veteran named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot while trying to protect his mother. He died a few days later. Because of what happened to him, a decision was made to march from Selma to Montgomery.”

“SNCC decided not to participate in the march because they felt Dr. King’s presence might overshadow the years of organizing and protest they had invested in voting rights in Selma. But [Lewis] was determined to march and [he] told [SNCC], ‘If the people want to march, I’m going to march with them.’ [SNCC] said [that he] could march as an individual, but not as the chairman of SNCC. That was fine with [him].”

“SNCC decided not to participate in the march because they felt Dr. King’s presence might overshadow the years of organizing and protest they had invested in voting rights in Selma. But [Lewis] was determined to march and [he] told [SNCC], ‘If the people want to march, I’m going to march with them.’ [SNCC] said [that he] could march as an individual, but not as the chairman of SNCC. That was fine with [him]. On March 6, several of [SNCC’s members] drove from SNCC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, to Selma, carrying [their] sleeping bags. [They] arrived at the SNCC Freedom House in Selma where we could stay and sleep.

“Meanwhile, at Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Andy Young, James Bevel, and Hosea Williams drew straws to determine who would represent the organization in the march. The one who drew the shortest straw would be the leader. Hosea pulled the shortest one, so he led the march on behalf of SCLC. The leaders of SCLC asked [Lewis] to lead with Hosea.”

“On March 7, 1965, John Lewis threw an apple, an orange, a toothbrush, some toothpaste and two books into his backpack, and prepared to lead a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.” “On an overcast Sunday afternoon, Lewis and Hosea Williams, a top aide to Martin Luther King Jr., led some 600 local residents marching in two single-file lines. The streets of downtown Selma were eerily quiet… Lewis thought he would be arrested, but he had no idea that the ensuing events would dramatically alter the arc of American history.

“As they crossed the Alabama River on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama state troopers descended on the marchers with batons and bullwhips; some demonstrators were trampled by policemen on horseback, and the air was choked with tear gas. Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull from a clubbing, thought he was going to die. That evening, the prime-time network news played extensive footage of what came to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday.”

“[Boynton] was [also among those] brutally beaten for helping to lead a 1965 civil rights march [The Selma-to-Montgomery March], which became known as Bloody Sunday and drew national attention to the Civil Rights Movement.” “The decision to march from Selma to Montgomery came after the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson in February 1965. Jackson was a young African-American teenager killed by the police in Marion, Alabama, after attending a rally.” “Some 600 protesters arrived to participate in the event.”

“As [the] marchers walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were met by 200 state troopers, plus posses of white men, many on horseback, deputized for the day by Sheriff Clark. The marchers were given two minutes to disperse. After one minute and five seconds, the phalanx of troopers and vigilantes advanced.

‘I saw them as we marched across the bridge, some with gas masks on, clubs and cattle prods in their hands, some on horses,’ Mrs. Boynton Robinson told The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, in 2005. ‘They came from the right, the left, the front and started beating people.’

A trooper struck her on the shoulder with a billy club.

‘I gave him a dirty look,’ she told The Crisis, ‘and the second time I was hit at the base of my neck. I fell unconscious. I woke up in a hospital.’

“A photographer captured the incident, as a fellow marcher sought to comfort Mrs. Boynton Robinson, who was 53 at the time. She was wearing a light-colored coat, gloves and heels.”

“Sheriff Clark reportedly told his officers not to offer any assistance to the nearly 70 marchers who were injured. As for Mrs. Boynton Robinson, he said, ‘Let the buzzards eat her.’ She was rescued by other marchers and taken to a segregated hospital, where she recovered.”

“Seventeen protesters were sent to the hospital, including Boynton, who had been beaten unconscious. A newspaper photo of Boynton lying bloody and beaten drew national attention to the cause.”

Because of Bloody Sunday, “Dr. King made an appeal for all religious leaders to come to Selma to participate in a march. Movement lawyers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund went to court, assisted by Assistant Attorney General John Doar. [They] appeared before federal judge Frank M. Johnson in Alabama and got a federal order to march from Selma to Montgomery.

On March 15th, only seven days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to Congress and delivered one of the most meaningful and powerful speeches any modern president has made on civil and voting rights. In that speech he used the theme song of the movement, saying, ‘And we shall overcome.’

“Finally, on March 21, Dr. King led a march of thousands from Selma to Montgomery. Since Governor George Wallace could not assure [their] protection, President Johnson commanded the National Guard to ensure [their] safety on the road. [They] arrived in Montgomery on March 25.”

“Eight days [after Bloody Sunday], President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act before a joint session of Congress. ‘It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country,’ Johnson said. On August 6, 1965, a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the VRA became law.”

Those who crossed the bridge on Bloody Sunday are known today as “Foot Soliders”, and TJC honors them and their courage because “Bloody Sunday prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, with Boynton attending as the landmark event’s guest of honor.” “This new law put an end to such discriminatory measures as literacy tests that used to deny many African Americans the right to vote. The act also gave the federal government more oversight over state election practices.”

20 years ago, reflecting on the 40th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Amelia Platts Boynton

Robinson wrote “Can you imagine American citizens suffering all manner of repression for more than 60 years – just to be a citizen, and not to be considered chattel? The struggle did not begin nor end with getting the right to vote as a first-class citizen in 1965. Strangely enough, this freedom or privilege was purchased by people of all races who gave themselves: Blood, sweat, tears, as well as death, paying the supreme price for freedom. There are unsung heroes and heroines whom we will never know.” (source: https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/highlite/2005/bloody_sunday.html )

Proposed Questions

The questions included below are designed to provide a guide but are not the only possible questions, nor may they be asked in the exact same order. If a question does not have a specific name, then it is for everyone.