SELMA, Ala. — Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights marchers walking in pairs across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, in Selma.

The marchers were protesting white officials’ refusal to allow Black Alabamians to register to vote, as well as the killing days earlier of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a minister and voting rights organizer who was shot by a state trooper in nearby Marion.

At the apex of the span over the Alabama River, they saw what awaited them: a line of state troopers, deputies and men on horseback. After they approached, law enforcement gave a warning to disperse and then unleashed violence.

“Within about a minute or a half, they took their billy clubs, holding it on both ends, began to push us back to back us in, and then they began to beat men, women and children, and tear-gas men, women and children, and cattle-prod men, women and children viciously,” said Mauldin, who was 17 at the time.

On Sunday, Selma marked the 60th anniversary of the clash that became known as Bloody Sunday. The attack shocked the nation and galvanized support for the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965. The annual commemoration paid homage to those who fought to secure voting rights for Black Americans and brought calls to recommit to the fight for equality.

For foot soldiers of the movement, the celebration comes amid concerns about new voting restrictions and the Trump administration’s effort to remake federal agencies they said helped make America a democracy for all.

“This country was not a democracy for Black folks until that happened,” Mauldin said of voting rights. “And we’re still constantly fighting to make that a more concrete reality for ourselves.”

Speaking at the pulpit of the city’s historic Tabernacle Baptist Church, the site of the first mass meeting of the voting rights movement, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said what happened in Selma changed the nation.

But he said the 60th anniversary comes at a time when there is “trouble all around” and some “want to whitewash our history.” And like the marchers of Bloody Sunday, they must keep going.

“At this moment, faced with trouble on every side, we’ve got to press on,” Jeffries said to the crowd that included the Rev. Jesse Jackson, multiple members of Congress and others gathered for the commemoration.

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama said they are gathering in Selma for the 60th anniversary “at a time when the vote is in peril.”

Sewell noted the number of voting restrictions introduced since the U.S. Supreme Court effectively abolished a key part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear new voting laws with the Justice Department.

Sewell has reintroduced legislation to restore the requirement. The proposal has repeatedly stalled in Congress. The legislation is named for John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman who was at the head of the Bloody Sunday march.

The annual celebration concluded with a ceremony and march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Kirk Carrington was 13 on Bloody Sunday. As the violence erupted, a white man on a horse wielding a stick chased him back to the public housing projects where his family lived.

Carrington said he started marching after witnessing his father get belittled by his white employers when his father returned from service in World War II. Standing in Tabernacle Baptist Church where he was trained in nonviolent protest tactics 60 years earlier, he was brought to tears thinking about what the people of his city achieved.

“When we started marching, we did not know the impact we would have in America. We knew after we got older and got grown the impact it not only had in Selma, but the impact it had in the entire world,” Carrington said.