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Bus riders to Montgomery retrace old steps while fighting a new fight
A man sings a spirtual song during a voting rally, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
Mike Stewart/AP
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Mike Stewart/AP
MONTGOMERY, Ala.— In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated for voting rights and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal protection. Keith Odom was a toddler then.
Now 62 years old, the union man and grandfather of three retraced some of their final steps. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, where he joined several dozen other activists on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he stepped off his bus and onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded.
“The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” said Odom, who is Black.
His voice trailed off as he saw the Alabama Capitol and a stage that sat roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original march.
Odom lamented that he and his fellow bus riders were not simply commemorating that seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead they came to renew the fight. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to send the Voting Rights Act to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign, securing and expanding political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.
Saturday’s “All Roads Lead to the South” rally was the first mass organizing response after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely diminished that landmark law. Striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, the justices concluded in a 6-3 ruling that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself discriminatory. That spurred multiple states, including Alabama, to redraw U.S. House districts in ways that make it harder for Black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect lawmakers of their choice.
“I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom said. “I want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”
Keith Odom, a forklift driver from Aiken, S.C., looks out from his bus seat as he arrives in Montgomery, Ala., for a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026.
Bill Barrow/AP
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Bill Barrow/AP
An old political battle is new again
The passenger rosters and the scene when riders arrived in Montgomery sounded the echoes and rhymes of past and present.
“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” said Justice Washington, a Kennesaw State University student named because her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”
No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008.
Kobe Chernushin is 18, white and just graduated high school in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby, a 29-year-old executive for the organization, doing standups for the group’s followers on social media.
“I believe in the power of showing up,” he said.
The buses launched from the congressional district in Georgia once represented by John Lewis, bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when he was 25. Lewis died in 2020, but some on the buses Saturday celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is named for him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override the U.S. Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and outlaw the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald Trump has instigated.
“I’m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he was a student,” said Darrin Owens, 27. He has worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.
“Political activism is personal,” Owens said, explaining that he attended Saturday as a citizen, not a political professional. “Sometimes those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black person living in a Southern state, I’m committed to action that stops what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person who represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.”
When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on Montgomery’s streets. A wounded, recovering Lewis did during the second march in 1965.
This time many of the Alabama troopers and local officers who walked the area were Black.
The buses and sandwich lunches had been arranged by Fair Fight Action, a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.
Bee Nguyen, left, talks to Carole Burton, center, and Tondalaire Ashford at a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
Bill Barrow/AP
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Bill Barrow/AP
Different generations share their stories
At different points, Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
“It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress, then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were,” said Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta.
She stood across from the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and not far from where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending Confederate president.
Nguyen and her sister Bee, a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women as they walked. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old Montgomery residents who have been friends since they were in a segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.
“I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford said, pointing at her dark skin. “It was never real integration, and it’s not like we can ever just blend in.”
Burton described them as being “in the second wave” of Black students. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “And we had to support each other.”
They remember their parents not being able to vote in the era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed. But they smiled as they swapped family histories with the Nguyens.
Burton said immigrants, descendants of enslaved persons and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths. “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us,” she said. “They’ve never fully lived up to it.”
Aaron McGuire sings a spirtual song during a voting rally, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala.
Mike Stewart/AP
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Mike Stewart/AP
Conflicting legacies are at stake
To Odom, who had begun his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court reinforced that history by refusing to see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair representation, not simply the “technical right to vote.”
He recalls decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond, a segregationist Democratic governor who became a “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and U.S. senator — by now as a Republican — into the 21st century. Odom said he fears his state losing U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, through redistricting.
“They want to take away that legacy when we’re still living with Strom’s?” Odom said.
Odom said he is also worried that the young people who participated Saturday are not a vanguard but outliers.
“I was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,” he said. “She told me she supported me but didn’t want to do it or work for anybody” running for office. “She wondered what any of them are going to do for her.”
Nonetheless, he said on the way home, “I’m still going to tell her what I saw and what I heard.”
A shooting near a community festival in Toledo, Ohio, wounded at least 12 people on Saturday, with police saying a search for the suspects was ongoing.
Two of the wounded were in a critical condition, Toledo deputy police chief Joe Heffernan said. He said it appeared there were at least two people firing weapons who were “probably shooting at each other”.
The Toledo police department said the shooting happened near the Old West End festival, an annual gathering of live music and home tours in a historic district of the city.
The department said an active search was under way for those responsible.
“I am deeply concerned about the situation in Toledo tonight,” Ohio governor Mike DeWine said in a statement. “Summer festivals should be safe spaces for families to spend time together without fear of violence.”
Multiple videos posted to social media showed people running over the sound of gunshots and emergency officials tending to others who appeared wounded.
Kevin Berry said he was sitting in the neighbourhood arboretum listening to live music with his friends when he heard a handful of gunshots ring out.
“Everybody hit the deck,” he said.
When he looked back up, he saw a gun being tossed to the ground. Police officers who were already on-site for the festival immediately responded to the scene.
Berry, who has medical training and served in the US Navy, said he walked around the area looking for potential victims who might need help.
He said he saw at least five people with gunshot wounds.
“The folks who were hit were spread out around the arboretum area,” he said.
The Old West End festival is a two-day celebration in Toledo’s historic district that includes live music, food vendors, home tours and shopping.
“This tragedy is really weighing heavily on both the residents and those who visit and enjoy this festival year after year,” said city council member Theresa Morris.
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By Cynthia Silva
June 6, 2026
A lifeguard overlooks an outdoor swimming pool.
Etienne Laurent/Getty Images
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Etienne Laurent/Getty Images
Teenagers hoping to hold the whistle as a lifeguard or camp counselor, or just work any job this summer are having a hard time getting hired.
“They now have more competition. There may be fewer jobs available,” says Brad Hershbein, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “They kind of get stuck with the short straw.”
Many factors are contributing to the competition for entry-level jobs: AI, inflation, tariffs, even those oil tankers stuck in the Persian Gulf. But all signs are pointing to 2026 being the worst job market for teens in decades.
“So many people are increasingly desperate to find a job, any job, especially if they have college loans,” Hershbein says. “That makes it that much harder for someone younger to be able to compete.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 219,000 fewer teens working this May compared to last May. Their participation in the labor force has been sliding since a peak of nearly 58% in the 1970s. Today, about a third of teens are in the labor force, either working or looking for summer work.
Mariella Silva, 19, had to hustle before finding a summer job as a barista at Zeke’s Coffee, a roastery and coffee shop in Washington, D.C.
She says now that she’s working, she feels more grown up. She is learning from her older coworkers and starting to understand and appreciate the value of money. She says, “Every time I spend something, I’m like, oh, this is like two hours of work.” She says she really feels the pinch of inflation when she considers whether to buy a meal out in the world, “I’m like, hmm. . . there’s food at home.”
Her boss, Jesse Lauritsen, doesn’t actually hire many teens. For starters, their schedules are hard to accommodate. Teens often have school or sports commitments and are new to the idea of carving out big chunks of time for work shifts.
“If they can only work one day a month, there’s no point in really hiring them,” Lauritsen says.
Economist Brad Herschbein notes that hiring managers may view teens as an investment that won’t pay off right away. “It’s almost a community service, rather than getting that productivity right away,” he says.
The dwindling job opportunities for teenagers means that plenty of them won’t get their first workforce experience while they’re still young, he adds. “A growing share of 18- to 19-year-olds are neither employed nor in school. They’re not really engaged in child care either.”
Economists call such people “idle.” It’s a strong term, but might be accurate, according to time-use surveys.
“They do seem to be engaging in a lot of leisure,” says Hershbein “The quintessential stereotype is, you know, someone’s playing video games all day.”
That pattern doesn’t just worry their parents. Many cities and school districts are trying hard to line up job opportunities for young people.
At a community pool in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Gayle Hurn hires over a hundred lifeguards and swim instructors every summer: She says she’s got a roster full of teenagers from around the city. “I think we need to start viewing teens as a really important part of the infrastructure of the workplace.”
Hurn says everyone who visits the pool feels the joy that her young workers bring to their job, even if she admits that teenagers can be hard to manage. “It’s my job to help them not just get a paycheck, but really build them so that when they move on from me, they can be super successful and really great contributors to whatever other work environment they join.”
Hurn makes them put away their phones, she works around their vacation schedules and she helps them through difficult conversations.
Happily, she adds, her teen employees are totally worth it.
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