Turning

When Sebastian Dollinger and his colleagues first drove into Yosemite National Park, they felt like they were entering the world at its finest — a prehistoric beauty of hulking rocks with every waterfall flowing in the valley.

It reminded Dollinger, who lives in Sweden, of the Swiss Alps in summer.

The moment didn’t last long.

As the group, in the park in early May for a fashion shoot for California luxury brand Robert Talbott, neared Mirror Lake in Yosemite Valley, Dollinger’s party felt like it had been overtaken by a massive swarm of bees as droves of other tourists buzzed around them, he said.

A tourist stands in front of an overlook near Yosemite Valley during a sunrise in mid-June in Yosemite National Park.

Tourists wait at the Yosemite Falls bus stop.

“I could have taken up climbing and gone up El Capitan just to escape the people,” Dollinger said, referencing Yosemite’s famous rock wall, “but I’m just a creative director.”

This summer, Yosemite is seeing a significant uptick in visitation, driven by the park’s internationally known splendor, its popularity on social media and a lack of its politicized reservation system. As droves of tourists flock to Yosemite, it raises the question: Is it still possible to have a fun time there despite the crowds?

Hopefully, yes, but that answer comes with a few heavy asterisks. Park-goers and local business owners say it’s crucial for those venturing into Yosemite this summer to plan their excursions outside peak times to avoid the worst of the crowds, and even then, pack their patience. The best-laid plans can still result in visitors facing significant lines at the park’s gate and restaurants, crowded hiking trails and a relentless search for parking.

By the end of June, Yosemite had seen at least 183,000 more visitors than last year, according to preliminary park visitor data. Just over 2 million people visited the park by the end of June, a 10% increase compared with last year’s visitation data.

Crowds pose for photos on the Mist Trail.

The increase in visitors is, in part, because the National Park Service is not using a timed-entry reservation system this year.

The National Park Service announced in February — after the agency under the Biden administration studied extensively how to best implement a reservation system — that officials would instead use “targeted management.” This has included sending congestion alerts to visitors’ mobile phones and encouraging visitors to venture outside the valley, as it represents only a fraction of its almost 1,200 square miles of parkland.

When asked how the agency planned to address overcrowding in Yosemite this summer, a National Park Service spokesperson who declined to give their name to The Times said in an emailed statement that temporary traffic delays can occur during peak times but aren’t evidence of “operational failure.”

“They reflect the reality of managing one of the nation’s most visited national parks while keeping visitors safe and protecting park resources,” the spokesperson said. “Claims of widespread ‘overcrowding’ are not an accurate characterization of current park operations. Visitors have benefitted [sic] from expanded access for months now, and we are seeing operational efficiency from managing traffic only when and where necessary, rather than blanketing the park with restrictions for entire seasons.”

Dozens of tourists hike their way up the Mist Trail in mid-June, one of the more popular trails in Yosemite National Park.

Visitors like Dollinger say this new approach is not working.

“After we hiked for about three hours, we met a couple from Japan, and when I talked to them they were almost in tears,” said Dollinger, who has visited other state and national parks in California. “They saved for five years to do this trip, flew to San Francisco from Tokyo, stayed in San Francisco and hired a car, and went to the park for five days, which I can only describe as hell.”

Not every Yosemite visitor that The Times spoke to for this story had as bad of a time as Dollinger, but no one disputed crowds being an issue.

Chidumebi Ajaero, who lives in L.A., said he was “very concerned” when he and his friends left for their trip in mid-April over how crowded the park would be.

It was Ajaero’s first time to visit Yosemite after moving to California about 2½ years ago from Houston. He has been to other national parks and said he knows they can get “quite chaotic” when busy.

Tents set up in Upper Pines Campground on a June weekend in Yosemite National Park.

Ajaero and his friends arrived in Yosemite on a Friday afternoon and were surprised to find there was no line to enter the Big Oak Flat entrance.

They set their campsite up at Upper Pines, a campground in the valley, and headed out early on the Mist Trail, which takes hikers to Vernal and Nevada falls via its large stone steps. There were a considerable amount of people on the trail with them, he said.

“It’s not until you get to the waterfall itself and you have the steps, and everybody is taking pictures,” Ajaero said. “There’s actually a line to move up. You’re just waiting for your turn to step up” to capture the waterfall.

Ajaero said he’s glad he went before Memorial Day, when visitation started to increase more significantly.

But because of how curated Yosemite Valley is, with a grocery store, souvenir shops and restaurants, Ajaero said it felt more like an amusement park than his trips to Joshua Tree National Park, where visitors are far more on their own.

Hikers walk on a boardwalk designed to prevent erosion in sensitive meadows.

“I didn’t love it as much as the other because of the commercialized feeling of it, and just the fact it never felt you were alone in Yosemite,” he said. “I think there’s too much going on.”

How developed Yosemite should be for its visitors has been a debate since the park’s existence.

Michael W. Childers, author of “The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park” (Nebraska), said people often use the metaphor of not wanting to turn the park into Disneyland, but a more apt comparison is how closely Yosemite resembles a resort.

Concessionaires have been in Yosemite since its beginnings, as the federal government didn’t have the money to construct its own amenities in the 1850s, he said. Yosemite Hospitality, a subsidiary of hospitality giant Aramark, manages much of Yosemite’s lodging, dining and activities (including the park’s Starbucks inside the valley).

Childers, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University, said his concern is that, since the late 1970s, conservative intellectuals have pushed to privatize the park even further.

He said the chaos being created by the Trump administration through cutting park staff and ending the reservation system is “very intentional” in the quest to argue the only way to manage the park is to privatize Yosemite.

“If you privatize the entirety of a national park, that means that your only one measuring stick is profit, and arguably, national parks are not solely designed for profit,” said Childers, an environmental historian of the American West. “They’re for experience. They’re for democracy. They’re for preservation of natural resources.”

Vehicles stop to pay the fee at the El Portal entrance gate.

Vehicles line the road near El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

One of park officials’ most significant management challenges started when tourists began entering Yosemite by automobile. Since 1913, people could enter in a personal vehicle, but visitation numbers remained reasonable until 1926 when the “All Year Highway,” a segment of the 140 Highway, opened.

This new thoroughfare created an easy and direct route to reach the park by car that avoided steep mountain roads, according to park history. The road’s opening resulted in a near doubling of total cars visiting the park in just one year, park staff said in an Instagram post.

“The summer of 1927 has clearly demonstrated that parking is one of the most urgent, menacing problems of the entire Yosemite Valley,” said Don Tresidder, president of the Yosemite Park & Curry Co., that year, according to the park.

And has thus remained for 100 years.

The first attempt in recent years to get a handle on car traffic was the reservation system, implemented initially to spread guests out during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 but rolled out in 2021, 2022 and 2024 as the park service tested how to best employ it to cut down on traffic and help more visitors enjoy the park.

“Over the past decade, many parks have seen significant increases in visitation and crowding in popular areas, especially during peak seasons,” the agency wrote in 2024 as it sought public comments on park management. “In some parks, the level of demand is exceeding the capacity for which infrastructure was designed or is outpacing the National Park Service’s ability to sustainably support visitation.”

The park service planned to use visitor feedback and research to guide how reservations would be rolled out in 2025. Environmental and park advocates argued for the reservation system, saying that it not only protected the wildlife and land, but also that it was popular among guests.

But when Trump started his second term in office, not only did park management strategy change, so did the way the federal government viewed the park service. Hundreds of park workers were laid off, although some got their jobs back. Others took buyouts, and overall there was a 24% decline in permanent workers, according to the National Parks Conservation Assn.

One of the reservation system’s biggest critics is Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Elk Grove), who said the system was decimating the economies of local gateway communities, the term used for the small mountain towns around Yosemite.

Parking lots are filled to capacity during peak hours, creating traffic congestion in Yosemite National Park.

“This is not to say that crowding in the valley hasn’t been a big problem, but the solution is better management and more capacity, not restricting access,” McClintock said on the House floor in June, noting the park had more parking, rooms and campsites before the 1997 flood destroyed infrastructure that he said wasn’t replaced.

Under the timed-entry system, visitors could still enter the park without a reservation if they arrived early — before 6 a.m. in 2021 and 2022 and 5 a.m. in 2024 — or after 4 p.m., and would be required to pay an entry fee for a three-day pass allowing them to reenter outside of peak hours.

But entering the park early or late in the day still wasn’t doable for everyone, including Ronny Shields, a father of two children from Ventura.

Shields, a lifelong Southern California resident, struggled to book a reservation when Yosemite implemented the system until he finally snagged one in 2024. His family had a great time and was eager to return.

In early June, Shields, his wife and kids, ages 4 and 7, made the trek back to Yosemite, staying outside the park at Tenaya at Yosemite in Fish Camp. Shields had researched and found information online suggesting the nearby southern entrance was less crowded.

His family arrived on a Saturday afternoon and entered the park without a wait. They found the valley was quieter than they’d ever seen it as people left.

Tourists stand in a meadow with a perfect view of Yosemite Falls.

For the rest of their trip, they entered the park before 8 a.m. or after 3 p.m., except for one day when they entered later in the morning and waited 40 minutes to enter. The other times, they found no wait.

Once inside the park before 8 a.m., their first stop was the Bridalveil Fall Trail, a short trek that takes visitors right to the base of the thundering cascade. When Shields and his family left the trail about 9:30 a.m., they noticed other guests couldn’t find parking.

They faced the same problem after they went to get food and then tried to park near the Lower Yosemite Falls trailhead. After 20 minutes, they found a spot — and joined the masses.

The trail “doesn’t feel like a hike — it feels like you’re in a crowded mall, but I think that’s the nature of the beast because it’s very short and very scenic,” Shields said.

Comparing his two visits to Yosemite, Shields said he preferred not having to deal with the reservation system, but that came with some caveats. He noticed far more visitors, although he’d expected even more. He saw more trash, several guests going off trail and trampling plant life, and far fewer park rangers to tell them to stop.

He said he didn’t see any park staff in the outdoor areas, and instead, he and his wife made sure to take their kids into the park’s buildings so they could speak to the rangers.

Tourists swim and play in the Merced River in Yosemite National Park.

“It’s nice for the kids to be able to ask questions and learn from people that love it,” Shields said. “Even I learned something.”

Jennifer Liu, a Moreno Valley resident, was at the park the same time frame as the Shields family and was able to mostly avoid the crowds on her backpacking trip through the park’s backcountry.

Liu meandered through the park using a few different trails, including the Sunrise Lakes route, to reach her ultimate destination: Half Dome on her birthday. She left her backcountry campsite about 4:30 a.m. to reach Half Dome by 6 a.m., catching the sunrise at 8,800-feet elevation from the granite monolith.

“I got lucky — the clouds cleared out and there was a nice sunrise,” she said.

Not in a hurry, Liu stayed at the top for four hours. Her fellow hikers sang her happy birthday, and she witnessed a couple get engaged.

Sunset over the Half Dome lookout in Yosemite National Park.

“By 10, when I headed back down, that’s when the crowd was starting to pick up,” Liu said, adding that she was grateful there was still space to navigate the dome’s cable system without being rushed by others.

As a means of crowd control, the National Park Service has attempted to funnel people out of the valley, where the majority of tourists spend their time and into its less frequented locations.

Park officials have tried to rebrand Hetch Hetchy, a massive reservoir surrounded by glacier-carved rock walls, by claiming that “many have compared Hetch Hetchy’s grandeur to the more well-known Yosemite Valley,” according to a recent update on the park’s website. (Previous versions of the Hetch Hetchy page made no such claim, according to archived versions of the website viewed through the Internet Archive.)

The park service doesn’t cite a source for such claims. California naturalist John Muir compared the two valleys’ beauties, but that was before Hetch Hetchy Valley was transformed by the O’Shaughnessy Dam into a massive reservoir.

“John Muir lost the fight over Hetch Hetchy, and the dam was built. And people who live in San Francisco today drink the water of Hetch Hetchy,” historian William Cronon said in the Ken Burns national parks documentary. “Muir died feeling that he’d been defeated by that, and that was a great tragedy at the end of his life.”

Still, Hetch Hetchy has long been whispered among Yosemite regulars as a place to find a little quiet.

That’s changed too.

An empty road under El Capitan in Yosemite Valley National Park.

“We used to have these secret spots we could tell people about,” said Elisabeth Barton, owner of Yosemite Basecamp in Groveland, which offers lodging, trips by local outfitters, gear and more. “‘Go to Hetch Hetchy,’ you’d say quietly and look over your shoulder. ‘Go to this waterfall’ or ‘Do this hike.’ … One of the things we’re noticing is, very quickly on a weekend, [the park] is sending out that alert that Hetch Hetchy is full or that Hetch Hetchy has ‘extreme visitation.’ It’s weird.”

Barton, whose company runs a visitor center in downtown Groveland, said there’s not much she and her team can recommend for people coming Thursday through Sunday into the park. It will be crowded regardless.

On a recent Saturday, Barton met a hiker who was devastated he couldn’t easily enter the valley without dealing with crowds. Barton let him in on a less popular trip that involved a great swimming hole, fish tacos at Whoa Nellie Deli, an adventure around Mono Lake and a drive through a stunning mountain pass. She recommended that he take a long way to reenter the park, enabling him to see the valley at a time he’d miss the crowds.

He called her a week later and told her to never recommend that to anyone ever again. He’d had a great day until he tried to reenter the park and instead waited four hours at the Tioga Pass in a line that stretched for miles. “You’re right, it was beautiful,” he told her, “but to what end?”

“I just wasn’t prepared for that,” Barton said. “It just broke me.”

Even sacred sites — with signage directing visitors away from the area — have been trampled by crowds.

The American Indian Council of Mariposa County, also known as the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation, fought for decades to establish Wahhoga Village, which is an ancient village site and the last place that Indigenous people lived in Yosemite Valley before being driven out by the National Park Service.

Today, Wahhoga Village includes a traditional roundhouse, traditional cedar bark houses known as umachas and the only cabin that the park service didn’t burn when it evicted the remaining families from the site in 1969.

Wahhoga is not listed on Yosemite maps and is not intended to be used by those who aren’t either authorized or invited by the council to be there, said Deborah Tucker, a council member whose father advocated for years for Wahhoga.

But, Tucker said, in recent weeks, tourists have been found picnicking in the site. Hikers were tromping right through the middle of the village, led by a user-generated route on a popular outdoors adventure app, she said.

And while there, someone peed all over the village’s grinding stones, which are used for processing acorns into flour, along with other foods, said Tucker, whose father is Paiute and Shoshone and her mother was Choinumni, a branch of Yokut, tribes indigenous to the region.

Tourist beat the heat and float on tubes in a river in Yosemite National Park.

Under the current administration, “it’s a free-for-all,” Tucker said. “You can come up there and do what you want, park where you want and you’re disrupting not just sacred sites but other park sites that the park service has [established],” leading to littering and other pollution, noise that harms the birds and speeding cars that threaten the safety of bears and other wildlife.

Tucker said because the current administration seems fixated on money over conservation, she hopes that when people visit the park this summer, they will at least hold themselves accountable, showing respect for the land and its inhabitants.

“Clean up after yourself, maybe clean up after one another, and don’t take anything home with you that you didn’t bring,” Tucker said when asked what she’d say to the park’s visitors. “Enjoy that experience, and [you’re] welcome to come back again.”

Alebtong, Uganda – When Lucy Everlyn Atim returned home after six years working as a child rights activist in South Sudan’s refugee settlements, her favourite shea tree was gone.

Known locally as moyao, the tree had shaped her childhood. Every morning, she and her friends gathered beneath its branches to eat its sweet, creamy fruit before walking to school.

Its disappearance was not an isolated loss. Across northern Uganda, many more shea trees had been cut down for charcoal.

“I got concerned,” Atim, now in her mid-thirties and a climate activist, told Al Jazeera.

“The destruction of shea trees is alarming. These trees need to be protected, but people also need an alternative source of fuel.”

Uganda loses an estimated 122,000 hectares of forest each year, largely to charcoal production and logging. With about 90 percent of households relying on charcoal for cooking, indigenous species such as shea and Afzelia africana continue to disappear.

Research by Makerere University found that mature shea tree populations on fallow land fell from about 20 trees in 2008 to between 10 and 15 by 2017.

“There is still scant data on the declining shea tree population in northern Uganda,” Dr Patrick Byakagaba, the Makerere University environmental researcher who led the study, told Al Jazeera.

“More needs to be done to determine their density, sapling survival and regeneration.”

Tracking the decline is difficult, he said, because charcoal producers often uproot entire trees, leaving no stumps behind to count.

While working in South Sudan, Atim met a woman in Yida making fuel briquettes from discarded shea husks.

“I got curious. I knew this was something that could be replicated back home,” she recalled.

In 2023, she founded Moyao Africa Initiative, a social enterprise that turns shea waste into fuel briquettes, while helping women earn a living from processing shea butter.

The initiative employs six staff and works with more than 1,200 women organised in savings groups to collect shea waste, produce briquettes and process butter.

“In most households, women carry the burden of finding cooking fuel. By training them to make and sell briquettes and shea butter, we’re creating an income while providing an affordable alternative to charcoal,” she said.

Learning fuel

On a hot afternoon in Alebtong, 15 women sit on woven mats attending a training session led by Moyao Africa Initiative.

They are chairpersons of savings groups from across the district, learning to turn discarded shea husks into cooking fuel.

When the trainer asks about the process, the women answer almost in unison: collect the husks, crush them, mix them with clay and cassava flour, mould them, dry them and store them.

The lesson soon moves from theory to practice. Some women pound dried shea husks in wooden mortars while others dig up clay soil. Nearby, another group stirs thick cassava paste, the binder that holds the mixture together before it is pressed into moulds and left to dry in the sun.

Among them is Catherine Akello, chairperson of the Oteno Moyao Africa Women’s Group in Abwoc village.

Before joining the initiative, Akello valued only the shea kernels, which she processed into butter for her family. The husks were thrown away.

Now they have become a source of fuel.

“I don’t have to worry about buying charcoal whenever I want to cook because I make my own briquettes from shea husks,” Akello, a 47-year-old mother of five, told Al Jazeera.

“As a group, we’re also able to save money from the products we sell, and that helps us support our families when emergencies arise,” she said.

Demand is growing, but production remains limited by the seasonal shea harvest.

To meet it, Atim is saving to buy a carboniser, crusher and briquette-making machine costing about $530. The equipment would allow the initiative to process more shea waste and produce briquettes throughout the year.

“Our plan is to increase shea butter production from 600 litres to 6,000 litres. That means more shea husks and, in turn, more briquettes. It will help us meet demand even when raw materials are scarce,” she said.

Shared future

Renewable energy expert Bosco Odyek told Al Jazeera that turning shea husks into briquettes offers a practical alternative to charcoal by putting waste material to use.

Using a carboniser, he says, would produce cleaner-burning, smokeless briquettes that burn more efficiently.

Beyond fuel production, Moyao Africa Initiative runs environmental clubs in 20 schools across Alebtong District and works with the National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) to distribute tree seedlings, encouraging communities to restore the landscape.

Paul Mwirichia, a humanitarian and development expert, told Al Jazeera that such initiatives are important but access to clean energy remains beyond the reach of many rural households.

“We have very good policies,” he said.

“The challenge is implementation. Government needs to support indigenous organisations like Atim’s because they understand the problems affecting their communities, and people trust them to address those challenges.”

For Atim, the work is about saving the tree that shaped her childhood.

The shea tree is gone, but she hopes turning discarded husks into fuel will mean fewer trees are cut down and more women can earn a living from keeping them standing.

“We are leaving no one behind.”

WASHINGTON — Holiday gatherings and major life events have come with an empty seat. Certain dates on the calendar meant time at a cemetery, standing before granite stones.

They are a relatively small group of people, scattered across different states, but they share a common bond that stretches decades: Each had a family member die violently in the struggle for voting and civil rights, victims on a long and difficult path marked by blood that ended when the country seemed to mature into the nation of its creed.

But 61 years later, and as the country approaches its 250th anniversary this weekend, those sacrifices are in question. In a series of decisions over the last dozen years, including one in April, the Supreme Court has essentially dismantled the law that their family members died to see enacted, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“My mother’s blood is on that bill. We were always proud of that, and now it’s gone,” said Anthony Liuzzo, whose mother, Viola Liuzzo, died on an Alabama highway between Selma and Montgomery while driving marchers in 1965.

Critics of the law contend that times have changed, an argument Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made in a 2013 decision that was the first major step in rolling back the law.

Survivors of lost loved ones disagree, pointing to the speed with which Republican-led state legislatures eliminated majority-Black congressional districts after the court’s April ruling, which severely weakened a section of the law that had protected voting rights for minority communities. They feel anger and sadness that a milestone political victory decades ago has been reversed, but they are committed to keep fighting.

A church bombing and a chunk of concrete

Lisa McNair was born Sept. 19, 1964. Her older sister, Denise, died in the Sept 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The church had been a central organizing point for civil rights protest.

The explosion killed Denise McNair, 11, and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris Wesley. Nearly two dozen others were injured. Three Ku Klux Klansmen were convicted years later.

One of Lisa McNair’s early memories of her sister was of the box that their grandmother kept from the funeral home. It included Denise McNair’s shoes, a purse and a rock-sized piece of concrete that had been embedded in her skull.

The crime brought the civil rights struggle onto the national stage and outraged President Kennedy.

The times were tumultuous, McNair said, but it seemed the nation was heading in the right direction. Most of her life, “I’ve seen advances” on television, in commercials, with interracial marriages, civil rights and voting rights, “a plethora of rights that we got over the greater part of my lifetime.” But that has changed, she said.

McNair, 61, said she is “physically sick” about the Supreme Court decision and subsequent actions by lower courts and legislatures.

“I am constantly working to pray my way through it, so I can get up and go to work in the morning and do what I need to do. But I just want to ask every white person I see, ‘What more do you want?;” she said. “‘Why do you hate us so?’”

They left for Freedom Summer and never came home

Michael Schwerner, known as Mickey, came from a family in which human rights activism and challenging social norms were expected. He was in Mississippi in 1964 as part of Freedom Summer when he, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney vanished one day in June while investigating a bombing at a Black church.

Their bodies were found weeks later, buried in an earthen dam in a rural area of Neshoba County. Schwerner, 24, and Goodman, 20, were white; Chaney, 21, was Black.

Stephen Schwerner, who died earlier this year and was a social activist in his own right, told the Associated Press in a 2023 interview that as soon as the family heard his younger brother and the other men were missing, they knew they were dead.

“Our family was very out front in the media that the only reason there was international attention was two of the young men were white,” said Stephen’s daughter, Cassie Schwerner. “Had all three of those young men been Black, they would have ended up absent from our history and our narrative.”

The executive director of Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, Cassie Schwerner, said her family has followed voting rights through their ups and downs. That includes the 2013 Supreme Court decision that allowed states and counties with a history of discriminatory voting rules to make changes without prior approval from the Department of Justice.

The court’s April decision, she said, brought rage “and a good deal of sadness — not for me and my family, but for this country.” There is, she said, work to be done on multiple fronts.

Rights paid for in blood turned out to be fragile

Tamara Orange said among her many thoughts when she heard of the Supreme Court decision in this year’s Voting Rights Act case, there was relief — “relief that my dad is not here to see that; that Jimmie Lee Jackson is not here to see it; that Viola Liuzzo is not here to see it,” she said. “I’m relieved for them because to me, it’s as though the sacrifices that were made were done in vain.”

Her father, James Orange, was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organize voting rights protests in Marion and Perry County, Ala., in 1965. When juveniles joined the effort, he was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Concern arose that Orange was going to be taken out of the jail and lynched.

A protest to intervene ended with Jackson, a 26-year-old Black church deacon, being shot in the stomach by a state trooper while Jackson tried to shield his mother and grandfather.

His death was the catalyst for what became the Selma-to-Montgomery march and “Bloody Sunday.”

Orange stayed in the movement all his life and died in 2008, Tamara Orange said. But even after the Voting Rights Act passed, “he would say, ‘Be careful or we’re going to lose it.’”

‘We got bad news for you’

Anthony Liuzzo had just turned 10 when his mother, 39, left their middle-class neighborhood in Michigan and headed for Selma. She had cried as she watched scenes from “Bloody Sunday” on television.

Viola Liuzzo participated in a portion of the second march and then helped drive other civil rights protesters around the Black Belt region of the state. On March 25, 1965, she was driving one protester between Selma and Montgomery when a vehicle pulled alongside and fired into the car.

The phone call came around midnight. Anthony Liuzzo remembers the caller asking his dad, “Is your wife Viola? We got bad news for you. She’s been shot.” When his father asked whether she was all right, the caller said, “No, she’s dead,” and then hung up.

An informant for the FBI quickly identified members of the Ku Klux Klan as her killers. The three men charged would escape conviction on state charges but be convicted in federal court.

Anthony Liuzzo and his siblings lived with the lost birthdays and other missed milestones. His comfort was that the voting rights she had died for had become a reality. But the April ruling by the Supreme Court and the subsequent rush by Republican-led legislatures in several Southern states to eliminate congressional districts represented by Black lawmakers left him angry and distraught.

Even so, he said he is still proud his mother had the courage to go to Selma “when others sat in their pretty little houses.”

One morning, the Klan returned

The inscription at the bottom of Vernon Dahmer Sr.’s tombstone reads simply: “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.”

It is a message that embodies his life’s work and the story behind his death.

Even after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, not every state was eager to implement the new law. In Mississippi, it came with a poll tax. The amount was $2, but in a world where a farmworker’s wages might only be $5 a day, that was substantial, said Dahmer’s son, Dennis Dahmer Sr.

The elder Dahmer, 57 at the time of his death, was a successful businessman who owned a store, sawmill and farm near Hattiesburg. He also was a civil rights leader and NAACP president in Ford County. He offered to pay the $2 for Black residents who wanted to register to vote.

He had already been under scrutiny by the local Ku Klux Klan. There was harassment and there were threatening phone calls. The windows were shot out of his store, but no one challenged him directly because his sons were always present and armed.

That seemed to tail off after Johnson signed the law.

“The Klan quit calling,” Dennis Dahmer said. “They quit shooting out the windows, so my family thought that all of this was behind us.”

That changed in the early hours of Jan. 10, 1966, when two carloads of Klansmen showed up. They firebombed the house and adjacent grocery store and began shooting at the house. The elder Dahmer shot back, using his ample arsenal to fight off the attack.

His wife and the three children who were home survived, but he suffered severe injuries from inhaling the smoke and fumes from the flames. He died later that day.

Dennis Dahmer was 12 as he stood next to his dad’s hospital bed. He wondered why some people wanted his father dead just for trying to help Black people vote.

A former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Sam Bowers, was convicted in 1998 for the attack and sentenced to life in prison.

Like the families of other survivors, Dennis Dahmer’s family has witnessed the methodical dismantling of the Voting Rights Act.

“Finally, they basically turned it into a relic,” he said.

His plan now is activism, to speak out and promote the need for a massive voter turnout. He also wants to remind people of the price that certain families paid for everyone to have the right to vote and be represented by someone of their choosing.

“We’re living in a time when America has a lot of the same characteristics of the 1960s that I grew up in,” he said. “People say, ‘Are we going back?’ Hell, we’re already there.”

Fields writes for the Associated Press.

One of Russia’s biggest advantages in the war against Ukraine is its ability to launch tactical airstrikes from bases largely out of reach of kinetic responses. While we have frequently reported about Ukrainian attacks on these bases, they aren’t sustained enough to stop Russia from generating devastating sorties.

Now Ukraine and NATO are looking to the private sector for ways of changing that equation through what is being called the Airfield Denial Challenge. It offers a 250,000 Euro award to companies or individuals who come up with workable ideas to prevent Russia from being able to use its air bases.

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) operational experience has firmly established that the ability of the adversary to project air power from secure rear-area airfields remains one of the most consequential asymmetries in the current conflict,” according to NATO’s Headquarters Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT). “Enemy tactical aviation, operating from bases beyond the reach of conventional Ukrainian strike assets, continues to conduct strikes using guided aerial bombs, cruise missiles, and stand-off munitions against friendly forces, critical infrastructure, and civilian population centers.”

The goal of this program is lofty.

“Each sortie originates from an airfield. Every airfield is a node of vulnerability: if it can be persistently denied, the adversary’s air campaign is fundamentally disrupted at source,” SACT suggested.

You can see video from one of the Ukrainian attacks on Russian tactical aviation bases below.

Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to halt these attacks are insufficient, SACT posited.

“Current workarounds: manned strike aviation, ground-based long-range fires (MLRS, ballistic missiles), and conventional single-unit loitering munitions have demonstrated limited effectiveness against defended airfield targets,” SACT argued. “They lack the mass-effect, persistence, and EW (Electronic Warfare)-resilience required to simultaneously suppress airfield infrastructure across multiple aim points in a contested environment.”

The “battlefield logic is clear,” the NATO subcommand added. “Point-defense and reactive interception of individual weapons must be complemented by persistent denial at the source.”

“We must find technologies that will help to permanently limit the enemy’s use of aviation infrastructure: aircraft, runways, fuel and ammunition storage facilities, and ground support infrastructure,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry (MoD) explained. “Ukrainian miltech companies, startups, and engineering teams are invited to participate.”

SACT said the challenge is technically agnostic and that it is looking for ideas that include, but not are not limited to, the following:

• Uncrewed aerial systems of any configuration or range class

• Autonomous or semi-autonomous munitions and loitering systems

• Swarming and mass-effect approaches

• Alternative delivery mechanisms beyond conventional aerial platforms

• Hybrid solutions combining multiple technologies

Regardless of what type of solution is presented, it “must be capable of operating in GPS-denied and EW-contested environments, across all weather conditions and seasons, and must demonstrate a credible path to rapid fielding.”

In addition, SACT is looking for systems that can conduct sustained strikes deep into contested airspace, operate without “continuous human control,” be fully autonomous and deliver “sufficient mass and precision to suppress multiple aim points across an airfield simultaneously.”

SACT also wants systems that require minimal training, and have AI-assisted target acquisition that “reduces reliance on expert judgment.”

The solicitation comes with the understanding that whatever solutions are presented won’t be proven, but should be at least in the mid-to-upper tier of the military technology readiness level (TRL) scale. It includes systems ranging from those having “high fidelity” laboratory integration of components to those with prototypes “near, or at, planned operational systems.”

Meanwhile, any solution that will take more than a year to be fielded won’t be considered.

The deadline for submissions is July 20. Ten finalists will be selected on August 11 and will be invited to a “pitch day” on Sept. 3, tentatively in Poland, to showcase their designs.

Whether this ambitious program will actually lead to the fielding of any systems that can persistently deny Russia the ability to launch aircraft is very much in question.

As we have frequently reported, Ukraine has one of the world’s most innovative defense technology infrastructures that has created drones, missiles and other weapons designed, tested and fielded under intense wartime conditions. However, it has still been unable to achieve the goals being sought by this challenge. 

One of the big issues Kyiv faces is the limited amount of funds to pursue some of these advances and what the Atlantic Council has described as “Ukraine’s inability to mass produce sophisticated weapons or sustain stable military supply chains.” 

Getting an idea into the hands of NATO, which has developed a half-billion dollar fund to develop weapons for Ukraine, could ultimately help turn an idea into a workable weapon to keep Russian tactical aviation at bay. Even if that happens, though, the time it would take to develop these weapons at a scale large enough to make a real difference would be a formidable endeavor.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com