On the voting rights trail, bus riders to Montgomery retrace old steps while fighting a new fight

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — In 1965, Black Americans peacefully demonstrated for voting rights and were beaten by Alabama state troopers before returning two weeks later to complete their march under federal protection. Keith Odom was a toddler then.

Now 62 years old, the union man and grandfather of three retraced some of their final steps. On Saturday, he came from Aiken, South Carolina, to Atlanta, where he joined several dozen other activists on two buses to Montgomery, Alabama. A few hours later, he stepped off his bus and onto Dexter Avenue, where the original march concluded.

“The history here — being a part of it, seeing it, feeling it,” said Odom, who is Black.

His voice trailed off as he saw the Alabama Capitol and a stage that sat roughly where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded the original march.

Odom lamented that he and his fellow bus riders were not simply commemorating that seminal day in the Civil Rights Movement. Instead they came to renew the fight. The 1965 effort helped push Congress to send the Voting Rights Act to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign, securing and expanding political power for Black and other nonwhite voters for more than a half-century.

Saturday’s “All Roads Lead to the South” rally was the first mass organizing response after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely diminished that landmark law. Striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, the justices concluded in a 6-3 ruling that considering race when drawing political lines is in itself discriminatory. That spurred multiple states, including Alabama, to redraw U.S. House districts in ways that make it harder for Black voters, who lean overwhelmingly Democratic, to elect lawmakers of their choice.

“I’m not trying to live a life that’s going backwards,” Odom said. “I want to go forward, for my grandchildren to be able to go forward.”

The passenger rosters and the scene when riders arrived in Montgomery sounded the echoes and rhymes of past and present.

“I talked to my grandmother before I came, and she was so excited,” said Justice Washington, a Kennesaw State University student named because her mother and grandmother had faith in the American system. “My grandmother told me she did her part, and now it’s time for me to do mine.”

No one on the Atlanta buses had reached voting age when the Voting Rights Act became law. The youngest attendee was born as Democrat Barack Obama was elected the first Black president in 2008.

Kobe Chernushin is 18, white and just graduated high school in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. He is an organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and spent the day filming Khayla Doby, a 29-year-old executive for the organization, doing standups for the group’s followers on social media.

“I believe in the power of showing up,” he said.

The buses launched from the congressional district in Georgia once represented by John Lewis, bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when he was 25. Lewis died in 2020, but some on the buses Saturday celebrated that a proposed federal election overhaul is named for him. If some Democrats get their way, the bill would override the U.S. Supreme Court, reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act and outlaw the kind of gerrymandering competition that Republican President Donald Trump has instigated.

“I’m here because of the same forces that pulled on John Lewis when he was a student,” said Darrin Owens, 27. He has worked for former Vice President Kamala Harris and now trains Democratic candidates.

“Political activism is personal,” Owens said, explaining that he attended Saturday as a citizen, not a political professional. “Sometimes those lines are blurred, and as a Black person in America, a Black person living in a Southern state, I’m committed to action that stops what I consider to be un-American, this possibility that the person who represents me is someone who is not from my community and does not understand me or my community.”

When he arrived, Owens saw no federal authorities on Montgomery’s streets. A wounded, recovering Lewis did during the second march in 1965.

This time many of the Alabama troopers and local officers who walked the area were Black.

The buses and sandwich lunches had been arranged by Fair Fight Action, a legacy of the political network built by Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who became a national figure in her unsuccessful runs in 2018 and 2022 to become the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history. No Black woman has yet achieved that feat.

At different points, Montgomery has branded itself as the cradle of the Confederacy and the cradle of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

“It feels like our country is stuck in this pattern of making progress, then there’s a huge backlash, and then people have to go through the same battle again just to get to where we were,” said Phi Nguyen, the 41-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She is now a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta.

She stood across from the church where a young King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and not far from where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office in 1861 as the slavery-defending Confederate president.

Nguyen and her sister Bee, a 44-year-old who served in the Georgia General Assembly and ran for statewide office, met two other women as they walked. Carole Burton and Tondalaire Ashford are 72-year-old Montgomery residents who have been friends since they were in a segregated junior high school and then newly desegregated Sidney Lanier High School.

“I don’t call it ‘integration,’” Ashford said, pointing at her dark skin. “It was never real integration, and it’s not like we can ever just blend in.”

Burton described them as being “in the second wave” of Black students. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. “And we had to support each other.”

They remember their parents not being able to vote in the era of poll taxes, literacy tests and other racist restrictions that the Voting Rights Act eventually outlawed. But they smiled as they swapped family histories with the Nguyens.

Burton said immigrants, descendants of enslaved persons and Native Americans have different but overlapping paths. “We just want to be treated like people with the same rights and opportunities the country has promised us,” she said. “They’ve never fully lived up to it.”

To Odom, who had begun his journey Saturday in South Carolina, the current U.S. Supreme Court reinforced that history by refusing to see some race-conscious election policy as a way to ensure fair representation, not simply the “technical right to vote.”

He recalls decades of his life being represented by Strom Thurmond, a segregationist Democratic governor who became a “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate and U.S. senator — by now as a Republican — into the 21st century. Odom said he fears his state losing U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, through redistricting.

“They want to take away that legacy when we’re still living with Strom’s?” Odom said.

Odom said he is also worried that the young people who participated Saturday are not a vanguard but outliers.

“I was talking to a 20-year-old co-worker about this trip,” he said. “She told me she supported me but didn’t want to do it or work for anybody” running for office. “She wondered what any of them are going to do for her.”

Nonetheless, he said on the way home, “I’m still going to tell her what I saw and what I heard.”

Kobe Chernushin, right, records Khayla Doby for the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition during a voting rights rally in Montgomery, Ala., Saturday, May 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Bill Barrow)

Bee Nguyen, left, talks to Carole Burton, center, and Tondalaire Ashford at a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Montgomery, Ala. (AP Photo/Bill Barrow)

Voting rights and democracy activists ride together from Atlanta to Montgomery, Ala., on Saturday, May 16, 2026, for a rally against efforts by Republican legislative majorities to reduce Black representation in Congress from Southern states. (AP Photo/Bill Barrow)

Keith Odom, a forklift driver from Aiken, S.C., looks out from his bus seat as he arrives in Montgomery, Ala., for a voting rights rally Saturday, May 16, 2026. (AP Photo/Bill Barrow)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A drone strike targeted the United Arab Emirates’ sole nuclear power plant on Sunday, sparking a fire on its perimeter. There were no reports of injuries or radiological release, but it highlighted the risk of renewed war as the Iran ceasefire remains tenuous.

No one immediately claimed responsibility, and the UAE did not blame anyone. It has however accused Iran of launching multiple drone and missile attacks in recent days as tensions have risen over the Strait of Hormuz, a vital energy waterway that Iran still has in a chokehold.

The United States is blockading Iranian ports and diplomatic efforts aimed at a more durable peace have repeatedly faltered. The UAE has meanwhile hosted air defenses and personnel from Israel, which joined the U.S. in the Feb. 28 attack that sparked the war.

U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested hostilities could resume, and Iranian state television has repeatedly aired segments with anchors holding Kalashnikov-style rifles in an effort to prepare the public for war. Fighting has also heated up between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon despite a nominal ceasefire there, further straining the wider truce.

The $20 billion Barakah nuclear power plant was built by the UAE with the help of South Korea and went online in 2020. It is the first and only nuclear power plant in the Arab world and can provide a quarter of all the energy needs in the UAE, a federation of seven sheikhdoms.

The UAE’s nuclear regulator said the fire didn’t affect plant safety. “All units are operating as normal,” the organization wrote on X.

The UAE statement didn’t blame any party for the attack. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said the strike caused a fire in an electrical generator and that one reactor was being powered by emergency diesel generators.

IAEA director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi expressed “grave concern” about the incident and said military activity that threatens nuclear safety is unacceptable, the agency said in a statement.

Sunday’s strike marked the first time the four-reactor Barakah plant has been targeted in the war. It is near the border with Saudi Arabia, some 225 kilometers (140 miles) west of the UAE's capital city, Abu Dhabi.

Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, whom the UAE have battled as part of a Saudi-led coalition, claimed to have targeted the plant while it was under construction in 2017, something denied at the time by Abu Dhabi.

The UAE signed a strict deal with the U.S. over the power plant, known as a “123 agreement,” in which it agreed to give up domestic uranium enrichment and reprocessing of spent fuel to halt any proliferation fears. Its uranium comes from abroad.

That's very different from the nuclear program in Iran, which is at the heart of its long-running conflict with the United States and Israel.

Iran insists its program is for peaceful purposes, but it has enriched its own uranium close to weapons-grade levels and is widely suspected of having had a military component to its program until at least 2003. It has also often restricted the work of U.N. inspectors.

Israel is widely believed to be the only nuclear-armed country in the region, but has neither confirmed nor denied having atomic weapons. Iran struck near Israel's Dimona nuclear facility during the war.

Nuclear plants have increasingly been targeted in wars in recent years, including during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. During the Iran war, Tehran repeatedly claimed its Bushehr nuclear power plant came under attack, though there was no direct damage to its Russian-run reactor or any radiological release.

There have been several instances of attacks around the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf countries in recent weeks. Talks between Iran and the U.S. are at a standstill as the ceasefire threatens to collapse and tip the Middle East back into open warfare, prolonging the worldwide energy crisis sparked by the conflict.

Two people familiar with the situation, including an Israeli military officer, said Israel is coordinating with the U.S. about a possible resumption of attacks. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing confidential military preparations.

Speaking to his Cabinet on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “our eyes are also open” when it comes to Iran. He said he planned a chat with Trump later in the day to discuss the president’s trip to China and “perhaps” other things. “We are prepared for any scenario,” he said.

On Iranian state TV, presenters on at least two channels appeared armed during live programs.

In one program, Hossein Hosseini received basic firearms training from a masked member of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. After being shown how to prepare the weapon, Hosseini mimed firing a shot at the flag of the UAE.

On another channel, female presenter Mobina Nasiri said a weapon had been sent to her from a gathering in Tehran’s Vanak Square so she could appear armed on camera. She said: “From this platform, I declare that I am ready to sacrifice my life for this country.”

Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Sam Mednick in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed.

FILE - This undated photograph released by the United Arab Emirates' state-run WAM news agency shows the under-construction Barakah nuclear power plant in Abu Dhabi's Western desert. (Arun Girija/Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation/WAM via AP, File)

A government supporter wears badges showing a portrait of the slain Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iranian and Palestinian flags during a pro-government gathering at Islamic Revolution Square in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, May 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)