Marching for hope and a future

Yesterday thousands of Alabamians and friends from all over marched in Selma in support of a "National Day of Action for Voting Rights - All Roads to Lead to the South." The Supreme Court has decreed that racist white politicians can rig elections so NO Black politicians can have chance to represent their communities anywhere that white Republicans control state legislatures. That's just fine, say the infamous black robed six. No more Voting Rights Act in practice. No, this is not fine. Too many people have fought and died for the right to a meaningful vote.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson recounts the struggle to win voting rights for all people in 1960s which culminated in Alabama.

Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

... Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

 Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6....

Mickey Welsh / Advertiser

The photos included here come from a wonderful photo gallery at the Tuscaloosa AL news site. It's well worth your time.

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I'm old enough so that the deadly SNCC Mississippi Summer project the year before, the Alabama voting rights campaign, and the Selma march over the bridge are part of my personal memories. A white teenager in a GOP household in Buffalo, NY, could follow the civil rights struggle in newspapers and short TV news broadcasts. I remember being mesmerized by the righteousness and bravery of the marchers.

And I was not as alone in that, as many white teenagers might be today. The private girls high school I attended had never had any Black students until my senior year; I bet the powers that be looked far and wide for the one shy girl who integrated that culturally rigid white place. She was enough younger that I never got a sense of how it turned out for her. 

But I do know that my graduating class were moved by the events of our time. It was the custom that each graduating class collect a sum of money to donate to the school toward something we thought would make the place better. We took a vote, all sixty-some of us, and made a plan. I was part of a delegation that went to the head of the school to present our plan: we wanted our class gift to begin to fund a scholarship fund for Black students. We more or less thought the school was a good place and we should share it.

As I remember, the principal seemed aghast. He was probably correct, even then, that there were legal impediments to such a racially conscious fund. I don't remember what we ended up doing for a class gift.

But in the mid-60s, it was possible for white teenagers to feel something in the wind, to identify with changing times. Can we again find that hope for a better, more just, more equitable country? There's nothing else to do ...