by Our Foreign Desk

CIVIL RIGHTS campaigners began a 40-day Journey for Justice from Selma, Alabama, to Washington DC on Saturday to highlight fresh attacks on equal rights.

Selma was the starting point 50 years ago for a march in support of legislation enabling black people to vote.

Activists, who say that a 2013 Supreme Court decision has allowed some states to reverse some of that progress, hope that thousands will join a rally in Washington in September.

The Journey for Justice will take an 860-mile route through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.

Organisers say that the outcry triggered by recent police killings, including the shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, needs to be channelled into a long-term commitment to bring about change.

“We can continue to be serially outraged or we can engage in an outrageously patriotic demonstration with a commitment to bringing about reform in this country,” said National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People leader Cornell William Brooks.

Marchers sang as they crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge, where state troopers beat activists protesting about the death of a black man at the hands of a white police officer in March 1965.

That event and a follow-up march from Selma to the Alabama state capital, Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King helped build momentum for approval by Congress of the Voting Rights Act, which removed all barriers preventing African-Americans from registering as voters.

President Barack Obama visited Selma in March to pay tribute to the original marchers, calling them “heroes” who had “given courage to millions.”