In Selma, foot soldier’s kin boosts youth voting rights role

By AARON MORRISON
Associated Press

During a commemoration of the 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Elliott Smith’s great-aunt pushed him across the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge in a stroller. Decades later, just before her passing, Smith switched roles and guided her wheelchair across the same bridge in 2015. She was Amelia Boynton Robinson, who helped lead the 1965 march. Now, at 27, Smith himself is in Selma leading a multiracial delegation of millennial and Gen Z activists with the intention of reshaping the ongoing voting rights debate around their generations’ access to political power and socioeconomic justice.