Most of you know that John Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. You may have seen Lewis’s body carried across the bridge for the last time after his death. You may also know that Pettus was a Confederate officer, an advocate of white supremacy as Alabama’s senator, and a leading figure in the Ku Klux Klan. Pettus was a powerful voice for the exclusion of Blacks into the early 20th Century.
The Washington Post today has an interesting article on why the famous bridge was named after Pettus during the Great Depression.
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