Phillip Hunter wasn't fighting for his right to vote when he walked 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, enduring police tear gas and billy clubs along the way. At 17, he was too young to vote.
"We were marching for our parents' right to vote. We weren't marching for us, because we were juveniles," Hunter, who lives in Bel Air off Ring Factory Road, explained about his role in helping to push for the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
One of two Harford County men who took part in the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights march that would change the course of American history, Hunter walked alongside President Barack Obama and his family in February's commemoration.
He was also surprised to learn he and other black men and women on the front lines of the 1965 protests would be receiving the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given to U.S. civilians.
"I personally didn't believe it when I heard it, but then as it began to sink in, I said, 'wow,' the president on the plane [for the Selma event] made sure that the foot soldiers who contributed to the Voting Rights Act were properly recognized," Hunter said.
"It's an overwhelming honor, and I think a lot of the foot soldiers still don't know that, that we are the recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal," he said.
Another Alabama native, Larry Tyson, of Abingdon, was only 2 years old and living in Birmingham during the 1965 marches. As a relatively new cycling enthusiast, however, Tyson decided to take part in a memorial Selma-Montgomery bike ride Feb. 21.
"I thought it would be an honorable thing to do," said Tyson, who joined several hundred cyclists from more than two dozen states for the ride.
'We're going on'
Born in Alabama's "black belt," named for its rich, dark soil, Hunter, 67, recalled a book called "Selma: The Queen City of the Black Belt."
"The 'queen city' part I did not understand, because of the racism and the apartheid-type system that existed back then," Hunter said. "When I grew up, Selma was a very segregated town."
The school system was segregated, as were all government facilities. All government officials were white.
"If you stayed in your place, you probably would be OK. When you so-called 'got out of your place,' that's when it became problematic, as a black person," he said. "Law enforcement was against us. We never looked at law enforcement that was 100 percent white as our friend, because they enforced that apartheid system."
Hunter's parents were activists, and his father was ordered by infamously-racist Sheriff Jim Clark to cease and desist the operations of Selma's NAACP chapter.
Living in a world of total racism, Hunter took part in three marches in 1965.
In the first one, "Bloody Sunday" on March 7, law enforcement officials savagely attacked protesters after they crossed Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, ironically named after a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
"They stopped us; the leaders up front told them to turn around. We said, no, we're going on, and that's when they ordered the tear gas to be released and the billy clubs," Hunter said.
"A lot of folks had really been brutalized," he said. "I got tear gassed; I could hardly see. I thought they had advised us not to rub our eyes if the tear gas caught up with us, but that was an inevitability; you had to rub your eyes."
"I managed to see to get to a building and hid behind the building until they allowed us to go back across the river," he said.
Those who were beaten could not be admitted to Good Samaritan Hospital, the "white hospital," and had to go to Burwell Infirmary, which treated blacks, he noted.
"Police were just swinging and doing what they did in a very inhumane way. [Sheriff] Jim Clark acted out the way the leadership thought he would and that is, go crazy, so the world media, was there to capture his inhumanity," he said.
Hunter recalled the other hardships of the demonstrations: sleeping on a dirt floor in a cow pen; eating soupy grits and fatback bacon for two weeks; being put in jail briefly because "we refused to sign this probation strip that said, in essence, if you demonstrate or march anymore, we can lock you up."
"We were supposed to not demonstrate or march for five years, so we couldn't sign that," he said.
When Hunter graduated from high school, on May 30, 1965, he found a secret "freedom diploma" signed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., tucked behind his real diploma. Hunter noted the school principal had threatened to expel everyone involved in the Civil Rights movement.
Hunter worked as a litigation attorney in Kentucky, served in the Navy and worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground starting in 1989. He retired in 2010.
Hunter, who raised two sons in Bel Air with his wife, Yvonne, has his suspicions why it took so much effort to secure the basic right to vote for African-Americans.
"We got the right to vote back in 1865. Why was it a problem in 1965, 100 years later? They knew the power of the vote," he said.
"Without the foot soldiers in Selma and all around the country, there would be no President Obama, based on the black vote," he said, explaining his commitment to returning.
"I would have been there some kind of way, whether by plane or walking or train for that 50th anniversary," Hunter said. "I was very happy that God blessed me to be able to attend and to witness, shake hands with the president."
Meaningful ride
Larry Tyson, 52, grew up in Birmingham, Ala., about 90 miles from Selma.
The Abingdon man, who retired from the military in 2010 after 26 years, began walking and biking several years ago. The idea of tracing the central route of the Civil Rights movement on its 50th anniversary was meaningful to him.
"It was just the idea of being a part of it and to commemorate the march," Tyson said, noting 54 miles on a bike was "nothing" compared to what the actual marchers endured.
The riders followed the historic path and stopped along rest stops to take in museums and other historically meaningful designations.
"To me, it wasn't a race," Tyson said of his Selma-Montgomery ride.
"We felt more of an honor just being able to do it. It was my duty being from Alabama and being a cyclist," added Tyson, who also is raising money for a 100-mile Endurance for a Cure Breast Cancer Biathlon to Washington, D.C., on May 1.
He said he also took his family on a Civil Rights tour through the South in 2013, bringing his wife and grandchildren.
"I was moved by being there, just like I was moved by being on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and just remembering, looking at what happened with Bloody Sunday," he said.