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"I'd do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again."
Jim Clark, the virulently racist former sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, who ordered his deputies to attack civil rights protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965, has died. He was 84 years old.
In January 1 965 less than 2 percent of the eligible black voters in Dallas County, Alabama, were registered to vote. In an organized voting rights drive, it was the practice of blacks to line up at the court-house in Selma each day. But the registrar would qualify only those black voters who could answer certain unanswerable questions. One of those questions was, "How many drops of water in a waterfall?"
On January 25, 1965, Annie Lee Cooper, a 54-year-old black woman, went to...