SELMA, Ala. -- Marie Foster was one of the civil rights marchers injured in an orgy of police brutality on the 'Bloody Sunday' two decades ago that spurred a stunned America to enact the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
'It was horrible,' recalled Foster, who was clubbed to the pavement in the assault by a rampaging posse on horseback and Alabama state troopers swinging billy clubs and hurling tear gas canisters.
The troopers had been dispatched to Selma by George Corley Wallace, Alabama's governor then and now, a man who once stood as the nation's best-known opponent of racial integration.
The four-term governor, confined to a wheelchair since a 1972 assassination attempt during one of his four campaigns for the presidency, now counts on black votes for his political survival.
It is a measure of the irrevocable change the voting rights law brought to the Deep South.
As for the segregationist who deputized and commanded the posse, former Dallas County Sheriff James Clark now lives in Scottsboro, an Alabama town that made racial headlines in an earlier time.
Clark, who once dreamed of succeeding Wallace as governor, is in debt and trying to make a living selling mobile homes after serving a prison stretch for marijuana smuggling.
It is painful for her to remember, but Foster, who is black, can never forget the mounted possemen who cracked bullwhips and screamed 'Get the niggers' as they rode down and beat with wooden staves demonstrators fleeing for their lives.
Foster, now a grandmother, planned to march again Sunday in a reenactment of the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march. The event is to end in a rally at the state Capitol in Montgomery, 50 miles to the east, on March 7 -- the 20-year anniversary of the notorious attack at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The bridge assault aborted that march, but by March 21, 1965, when the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led Foster and other civil rights demonstrators triumphantly into Montgomery, the voting rights legislation spurred by the attack was well on its way to becoming the law of the land.
'I walked every step of the way,' Foster said proudly.
A dental hygienist who worked in the local civil rights movement two years before King took over leadership of the Selma campaign, Foster still is active in registering black voters. She was a delegate for the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.
Foster first met Jackson when he was a young activist in the Selma campaign.
'Oh, Jesse was for real,' she said. 'You could tell then he was sincere.'
She also knew King, who plotted strategy while living in her brother's home during the campaign.
King and Jackson, who was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which King headed, were not at the bridge spanning the muddy Alabama River on 'Bloody Sunday.'
That march was led by Hosea Williams, a King aide who was later to become a Georgia legislator, and John Lewis, president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Lewis's skull was fractured in the attack but he survived to become a city councilman in Atlanta.
'It was a trooper who hit me,' said Foster, just as she crossed the bridge near the head of the column of about 525 demonstrators, including a few whites. 'I lay on the pavement with my eyes closed. I didn't move. I stood my ground.'
As television cameras recorded the assault for the world, white bystanders jeered the victims and cheered the attackers.
Foster heard a trooper shout, 'Get that nigger woman out of here.'
She did not move as tear gas billowed from a canister that landed at her side. She lay with her head on her knapsack, trying unsuccessfully with a handkerchief to block the acrid fumes.
Recalling the terror of that 'Bloody Sunday,' Foster said quietly, 'The horses were riding right over us.'
