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A Brighter Legacy Of Selma

A Brighter Legacy Of Selma

The morning after President Barack Obama delivered his soaring speech in Selma, former governor George Wallace’s 65-year-old daughter stood on the steps of the Alabama Capitol and — in a soft, sometimes quivering voice — renounced the acts of hate committed there by her father.

“It was here,” Peggy Wallace Kennedy said, “that I heard my father say the words ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.’

“It was here that my father fought to support a culture of exclusion, riding on the wings of fear rather than seeking justice on the wings of eagles.”

The crowd in Montgomery included civil rights activists and their survivors, the current governor of Alabama and members of Congress, including Freedom Rider John Lewis, who 50 years ago was nearly beaten to death by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. “My friend,” he called her. “My sister.”

Twice the audience rose to its feet in applause for this gentle, petite woman, who only in recent times has found the courage to speak publicly about the truths she has imparted to her children for years.

“For so long, I’ve been somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife,” she said in a telephone interview the next day. “I stayed home and took care of the children. I was always in the crowd, never a leader; always learning, never teaching.”

Her life changed, she said, after she endorsed Obama in 2008. “He inspired me. He gave me a lot of courage to find my own voice and speak out. My children were older. I wanted to leave for them a legacy different from the one my father left for me.”

That legacy includes the 1963 image of her father blocking the doors at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, vowing to prevent integration of the campus and then stepping aside for federal troops. Such an ugly public history was bound to catch up with her children.

When her son Burns was a little boy, Kennedy and her husband, Mark, took him to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. The child, she said in her speech, “stood still as the truth of his family’s past washed over him.” He turned to her and asked, “Why did Paw Paw do those things to other people?”

George Wallace’s daughter became the mother who dared to hope. She knelt down beside her son and pulled him close. “Paw Paw never told me why he did those things,” she said, “but I know that he was wrong. So maybe it will just have to be up to me and you to help make things right.”

One of those things was trying to make amends for the harm her father had rained down on Lewis. Her voice trembled but never broke, and she glanced at Lewis and thanked him for the gift of forgiveness in taking her hand in 2009 and walking with her across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“Fifty years ago,” she said, “you stood here in front of your state capitol and sought an opportunity as a citizen of Alabama to be recognized and heard by your governor, and he refused.

“But today, as his daughter and as a person of my own, I want to do for you what my father should have done and recognize you for your humanity and for your dignity as a child of God, as a person of goodwill and character, and as a fellow Alabamian and say, ‘Welcome home.'”

The standing ovation was long and loud. A few minutes later, Kennedy locked arms with Lewis and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and led a two-block march up Dexter Avenue to the Southern Poverty Law Center, where children would lay a wreath.

The march the day before on the Edmund Pettus Bridge had been boisterous, full of chatter and laughter against a backdrop of loud music. This time, the march was virtually silent except for the whir of media cameras and shoes meeting the pavement.

The crowd walked past Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach. In 1979, George Wallace showed up unannounced at the church to ask for forgiveness for his racist past.

As Peggy Wallace Kennedy approached the church, John Lewis leaned in to whisper in her ear: “Your father would be very proud of you today.”

“That’s all he had to say,” she said later. “That was all I needed to hear. I wanted to pick up where my father left off. I wanted to step out of the shadow of that schoolhouse door.”

On she marched, head high and the sun at her back in Montgomery.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: People along the Edmund Pettus Bridge at dusk in Selma, AL, on Saturday, March 7, 2015. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Thousands Remember 1965 Selma March In Bridge Crossing

Thousands Remember 1965 Selma March In Bridge Crossing

By Matthew Teague, Ann Simmons and Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SELMA, Ala. — Thousands of marchers, many singing “We Shall Overcome” or “This Little Light of Mine,” turned out Sunday to retrace the steps their forebears took half a century ago on the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The route was the same, but the conditions were far different. Instead of enduring tear gas and billy clubs on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, the weekend’s visitors crossed the bridge with smiles and songs.

On the weekend marking the 50th anniversary of the demonstration that led to the Voting Rights Act’s passage, some marchers locked arms and some knelt to pray as they crossed the bridge — named for a Confederate general who was also a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

The March 7, 1965, protest had been planned to go from Selma to Montgomery but was delayed by law enforcement violence. Marchers reached Montgomery on March 25, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed demonstrators at the state Capitol steps.

On Sunday, Claudia Mitchell, 62, came from her home in Montgomery, about 50 miles east, and took photos of her daughter Temisha at the foot of the bridge. Mitchell had joined the 1965 marchers as they entered Montgomery, and remembers many of them staying at her parents’ house at night.

“We couldn’t even stay in the hotels then,” Mitchell said. “So I’m here to commemorate that day.”

Sunday started with fiery sermons at Brown Chapel Church, where the 1965 marchers based themselves. Several speakers, including U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the Rev. Al Sharpton, called for restoration of the Voting Rights Act, which was weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling, Shelby County v. Holder.

In a 5-4 decision, the court struck down a key part of the act that required Southern states to seek federal approval before changing their election laws or redrawing districts.

“This may be the most important case of our generation,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in an interview. “They gutted the act.”

The congregation at Brown Chapel included Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Loretta Lynch, President Barack Obama’s nominee to succeed Holder as attorney general.

In a fiery speech, Sharpton said, “We know why they went across that bridge, and there’s still some bridges we have to cross.”

In a less figurative way, Sharpton and his fellow dignitaries didn’t make it on time for Sunday’s planned midday bridge crossing. With the Secret Service and other security infrastructure that had accompanied Obama on Saturday gone, Sunday’s crowds overwhelmed authorities. By midday, the bridge was packed with people.

Alabama state troopers and local police tried to persuade demonstrators to make room for motorcades.

Rose Sanders, a local civil rights activist, grabbed a bullhorn. “Please everybody, I’m pleading with you, clear the bridge,” she said. She burst into laughter at the futility of her plea.

“We’ve never had this many people in Selma. You’re gonna have to forgive us! We don’t know what we’re doing!” Sanders said.

Although various dignitaries didn’t get to the head of the line, many aged people who had walked with King in 1965 did. They led the way across the bridge.

“This is no party, this is no picnic,” the Rev. William Barber shouted into a bullhorn at the head of the line. He gestured to the elderly original walkers. “What they had was discipline. Somebody say discipline!”

“Discipline!” the crowd responded.

Several helicopters and at least one drone hovered overhead, and marchers waved at them from the bridge.

Back at Brown Chapel, Holder urged state legislatures “to lift restrictions that currently disenfranchise millions of citizens convicted of felonies” and added that his expected successor, Lynch, who is also black, “will continue to fight aggressively on behalf of this sacred right.”

On the bridge, a group of ex-convicts carried a banner that read, “Formerly incarcerated people — we demand our civil and human rights.”

Holder also drew applause by nodding to current controversies in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere across the U.S. He noted that the activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was killed in Marion, Ala., in 1965, was an unarmed black man.

“We will march on,” Holder said, calling on listeners to “challenge entrenched power.”

On the bridge, numerous groups chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe,” references respectively to Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City, unarmed black men killed in confrontations with police.

A large contingent of Latino marchers carried placards and called for more rights for immigrants. Jasmine Contreras, 27, of Clanton, Ala., came with a group called the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice. “We are just here to bring attention to the need for fairness,” she said.

Louis McCarter, 65, of Birmingham, found some peace and shade under the bridge with his 10-year-old granddaughter, Chelsea.

McCarter remembers the bad times in Birmingham, he said. He brought his granddaughter to Selma to see where much of the civil rights struggle took place.

“Our lives are better because of this,” he said.

Donald Harris, 66, chairman emeritus of the men’s Division of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition, led one of two busloads of Rainbow Push supporters from Chicago to Selma.

All the way, he said the travelers had discussed the significance of Bloody Sunday and the importance of passing the torch of the civil rights struggle to the younger generation.

The group included seniors who marched in 1965, he said. “We don’t know if any of us will be back here again.”

Patrick O’Neill, wearing a T-shirt that bore King’s image, stood among Sunday’s swarm of people on the bridge. Around his neck, O’Neill wore a sign reading: “I’m sorry.”

He runs a branch of a Christian pacifist organization called Catholic Worker House in North Carolina.

“I feel I need to accept responsibility for my privilege as a white male,” said O’Neill, 58. “I didn’t want to make it complicated. Just two words of repentance.”

Elvira Carter, 48, of Butler, Ala., overheard him. “I just want to shake your hand,” she said.

“It’s good to see someone apologizing,” Carter said. “It’s not your fault. It’s not mine. But thank you.”
––––
Pearce reported from Los Angeles.

Photo: Thousands wait downtown to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday, March 8, 2015, in Selma, Ala. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

After Selma — Again

After Selma — Again

WASHINGTON — Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

The title of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last book, published in 1967 after Selma and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, poses a perennially appropriate question — about our country’s struggle over race, of course, but also about our larger quest for justice.

It is much better than the question President Obama rightly scorned on Saturday as he honored the 50th anniversary of Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” in one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency. To ask if our current struggles, in Ferguson, MO, and elsewhere, suggest that “with respect to race, little has changed in this country” would sound absurd to those who lived through the oppression of the past.

Neither the demonstrators nor the police who pummeled them as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 could have imagined that in 2015, an African-American president would be leading the ceremonies memorializing the moment. They would have been just as astonished that the states of the Old Confederacy now send one African-American to the Senate and 19 to the House, including John Lewis, whose beating on the bridge marked the beginning of his career as a national treasure.

But politics rarely produces final victories, and even the victories that do endure are often partial. Thus did Obama insist that a true love of country entails a belief “that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation.”

So it must be with race and with justice. We commemorated Selma less than two years after the United States Supreme Court had struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the product, as Obama said, “of so much sacrifice in the face of wanton violence.” The Court’s ruling opened the way for many states to pass laws infringing on access to the ballot.

And the weekend’s events came just days after the release of the Justice Department’s devastating report on policing in Ferguson. It found that in a city that is two-thirds African-American, 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests over a two-year period involved blacks.

“A single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg,” said Attorney General Eric Holder, referring to the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Dr. King was right: The alternative to community is chaos. His question stands: Where do we go from here?

At a minimum, Congress should honor Selma by restoring an effective Voting Rights Act, once a bipartisan cause. Why should Republicans walk away from their party’s most commendable traditions?

But let’s be more adventurous and make voting in federal elections an obligation of citizenship. “How,” Obama asked, “do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought?” Yes, “compulsory voting” seems a nonstarter in the United States, as my political scientist friends Tom Mann, Norm Ornstein and I well know. The three of us have been arguing for this idea based on our experiences in Australia, a country for which we have great affection, where voters are required to go to the polls. The system works well, raising turnout especially among the less well-to-do and the less ideological. This creates a more moderate and more representative electorate. Crucially, such a law tells state and local governments that instead of creating barriers to voting, they should ease the way for citizens to fulfill their civic duty.

And we must re-engage the larger point King made in 1967: That the fruits of civil rights victories would not be widely shared until “the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.” Noting that two-thirds of poor Americans at the time were white, King expressed hope that “both Negro and white will act in coalition” on behalf of full employment or, in the alternative, in support of a guaranteed income for all Americans.

“There is nothing but a lack of social vision,” King wrote, “to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer.”

But achieving this social vision requires a political system that genuinely represents the hospital worker, the maid and the day laborer, which was the point of Selma’s suffering. At the moment, ours doesn’t.

So the struggle in Selma was successful, but it isn’t over. “America is not yet finished,” Obama said. A great nation does not leave the work of revolution half-done.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: President Obama speaks at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL, on Saturday, March 7, 2015. (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Top Reads For News Junkies: ‘Walking With The Wind: A Memoir Of The Movement’

Top Reads For News Junkies: ‘Walking With The Wind: A Memoir Of The Movement’

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, AL, one of the critical moments in the civil rights movement and recently dramatized in the motion picture, Selma. John Lewis’ memoir, Walking with the Wind, is one story of that movement. The memoir recounts his remarkable journey from the young man who led campaigns for desegregation in the turbulent 1960s to the House of Representatives, where he has represented his Georgia district for over a quarter-century.

You can purchase the book here.