Irmo Man Remembers Turnaround Tuesday

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Columbia , S.C. (WOLO) — Over the weekend, thousands gathered in Selma, Alabama to remember a day known as, ‘Bloody Sunday,’ where marchers for voting rights were met 50 years ago with violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Tuesday, Carl Evans, a retired professor from the University of South Carolina, re-lived ‘Turnaround Tuesday,’ a march in Selma that took place 2 days after Bloody Sunday. “I was a seminary student as the time in Dallas, Texas and saw the footage of the beating that went on at the marchers on Sunday, I was compelled to respond to that in some way,” recalled Evans. A call to action for Evans, he joined nearly 2,500 marchers that Tuesday to fight for justice. “Justice denied to one is justice denied to all, is what Dr. King said and that’s certainly true,” said Evans. Unlike Bloody Sunday, Evans said Turnaround Tuesday went on peacefully after they were forced to stop at the top of the bridge. “At that point Dr. King knelt and we all knelt and we prayed in the street over the bridge and then turned around to go back to the Brown Chapel Church where the march had begun,” he said. Evans described the day as one of uncertainty due to the violence that occurred two days before. “As we came to the crest of the bridge we could see patrolman with blue helmets standing two deep, night sticks and arms crossed, they looked as if they were ready to launch into the marchers, we didn’t know what would happen but as I mentioned it turned out without any violence,” said Evans. As the country remembers Selma 50 years later, Evans said there is a message for young Americans. “What it means to be an American is to participate in the process of making ourselves better, I think that’s what happened at Selma,” he said.