The following is an excerpt from Tulsi Gabbard's new book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind, published by Regnery and out April 30.

As we sat on the bus traveling through Alabama, stopping at several historically significant sites of the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, John Lewis and some of his fellow Freedom Riders shared firsthand accounts of what they experienced.

About 600 people, most of them Black, lined up on one side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the last Confederate general to serve in the U.S. Senate, who was also the leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. Their plan was to march more than 50 miles to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery and demand that Governor George Wallace protect Black Alabamans' right to vote. Wallace had gotten wind of this plan ahead of time, however, and declared that "a march cannot and will not be tolerated," adding that it was his duty to ensure "the protection of the lives and property of our citizens and those traveling through our state."

Standing in Selma and staring across the bridge to the other side, John Lewis and his fellow marchers saw "a sea of blue-helmeted, blue-uniformed Alabama state troopers, line after line of them, dozens of battle-ready lawmen stretched from one side of U.S. Highway 80 to the other."

John Lewis knelt on the ground and prayed. Hundreds of other marchers did the same. Writing in Walking with the Wind, he remembers "the clunk of the troopers' heavy boots, the whoops of rebel yells from the white onlookers, the clip-clop of horses' hooves hitting the hard........

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