Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 11, 1990 TAG: 9003112845
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Jules Loh Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
That must mean that it won't be long before what happened here 25 years ago will seem as distant and unreal as all those other happenings duly noted in passing on fading historical markers across America, snippets of history largely ignored. This new one records "Bloody Sunday" and the "Selma-to-Montgomery March."
What happened here was the battle of Selma. No, not the battle of Selma when Yankee troops sacked the town and burned its Confederate arsenal. That was in 1865. This battle of Selma was in 1965 and lasted 10 weeks.
What was sacked in 1965 was an arsenal of inequality, a systematic scheme to deny black Americans the right to vote. To the victors, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ranks with the Emancipation Proclamation on the scale of liberty.
Veterans of that battle, graying soldiers of what they still call, reverently, The Movement, returned last week from across the nation on a journey that in some respects had the flavor of a religious pilgrimage.
They came to march in procession and to sing old hymns and to embrace old friends and walk on old battlegrounds, some hard to recognize now. And they came to convince a new generation of blacks, who take the ballot for granted, that even after the Selma-to-Montgomery march there remains a distance to travel.
"We are a long way from having our fair share of the American pie economically and socially," said John Lewis, a returning soldier from Atlanta. "What better place to rededicate ourselves to all that is left to do?"
A billy stick fractured Lewis' skull at the Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. Now he is a congressman, a symbol of both the event and its result.
What better place indeed?
"Selma did more for the nation than Selma did for itself," Lewis said, referring to a current local racial dispute.
Selma, then and now, is a city of about 27,000 people almost equally divided racially, about 52 percent black. The issue then was clear-cut, the right to vote. The issue now is less so. But it seems that even after 25 years when disputes get hot in Selma the sides line up according to race, often reluctantly, on both sides.
The dispute today is over the dismissal of the first black school superintendent in Alabama.
The School Board that hired him, made up of six whites and five blacks, voted not to renew his three-year contract. The vote was 6-5. The lines were drawn and lawmen were called to keep order in the schools and at city hall.
Selma 25 years ago became the national symbol of racial intolerance. Even its two fishing ponds, side by side, were racially segregated.
Today Selma, of all places, qualifies at first look as a model of racial harmony and integration. Blacks and whites work, live, shop and worship side by side. Yet the city remains as racially polarized as ever.
Selma today is like a marigold, lovely to behold but with a strange odor when you get up close.
Lewis spoke on March 4 at the Brown Chapel AME Church, The Movement's foremost shrine. It was built by former slaves and sons of slaves and looks much as it did 25 years ago with its twin red towers and worn oak pews, although two chinaberry trees that gave shade outside are gone. Inside, its sweet musty smell of deliverance remains.
For those 10 weeks in 1965 that venerable sanctuary throbbed with hymns of hope and courage and The Movement's anthem, "We Shall Overcome," and trembled to the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr., whom many white Selmans back then called derisively "de Lawd."
Not long ago Joe Smitherman, who was Selma's mayor in 1965 and remains so today, said from the pulpit of Brown Chapel: "My hands are as dirty as the others. I ordered the arrest of Dr. King. We were wrong. I did it. I'm sorry."
Bloody Sunday was March 7, a dour and chilly day. About 600 blacks left Brown Chapel and crossed the Pettus Bridge. They aimed to march to Montgomery, the state capital 54 miles away, to petition Gov. George Wallace in person for the right to vote. Wallace forbade the march.
The hymn they sang at Brown Chapel that morning was "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen."
And nobody had. Nobody could have foreseen the orgy of official violence that turned back the marchers, state troopers with clubs and tear gas and deputies on horseback with bullwhips.
Americans by the hundreds, black and white, came to Selma in outrage.
For two weeks they camped outside Brown Chapel beneath the chinaberry trees and on the dirt road in front, Sylvan Street. A thick rope confined them to that street in Selma.
Today, Sylvan Street has been renamed. It is now Martin Luther King Jr. Street. "It's the longest street sign in town," said Smitherman grandly. The street is now paved, and lit, as are all the streets in east Selma now, and there are no more outhouses in the neighborhood, which were commonplace.
In front of Brown Chapel, where the chinaberry trees used to be, a bronze bust of King rests on a tall granite monument.
So much of the Selma of '65 is gone, largely unmourned.
A car dealership has replaced the Silver Moon Cafe. There, on the sidewalk out front, one of those white sympathizers who came to Selma, James Reeb, a minister from Boston, was bludgeoned to death two days after Bloody Sunday. The night he lay dying a throng kept candlelight vigil on Sylvan Street, all night, behind the rope, in the rain.
The whites-only Selma Del eatery on Broad Street, the main drag, is gone. In its place stands - are you ready? - the Booker T. Washington Insurance Co.
Camp Selma is gone, too. It was once an old chain-gang camp long abandoned and then revived in 1965. Sheriff Jim Clark, whose lapel button said "NEVER," arrested blacks by the hundreds when they lined up in front of the courthouse to register to vote. Camp Selma was where he imprisoned them.
Camp Selma also accommodated the 3,000 Army regulars, Alabama National Guardsmen and federal marshals sent to protect the ultimate march, the victory march from Selma to Montgomery on March 21-25.
The night before the march 4,000 people, the potential marchers themselves, slept wherever they could find a place, some on church pews, some on couches in the housing project across from Brown Chapel, some on the Sylvan Street dirt rolled in blankets in a cold wind under a waning three-quarter moon.
Next morning, the first day of spring, they met at Brown Chapel, prayed, sang and gathered at the river, at the Pettus Bridge, and began a journey that seemed somehow biblical after all that had gone before.
Even the old highway, the route of the march, is not as it was. It was called then the Jefferson Davis Highway, a two-lane road most of the way to Montgomery. So the marchers' numbers were reduced, by court decree, to 300 when they reached the two-lane stretch in Lowndes County. The rest hoofed it back to Selma or hitched rides with volunteer drivers in hired cars and buses.
Today the Jefferson Davis Highway is simply U.S. 80, a divided four-lane motorway. The sharecropper shacks have vanished. If the re-enactors of the march sipped no well water they at least were cheered by meadowlarks and mockingbirds, which still abound along the way.
When the 1965 march reached the outskirts of Montgomery its numbers again swelled to 4,000, then to 10,000, to 20,000, and on the next afternoon to at least 25,000.
They marched past a street now, but not then, named Rosa Parks Avenue, named for the black woman who refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus.
They marched up Dexter Avenue past the church where Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor, the man who agreed reluctantly to take up Parks' cause, to eventually become the charismatic head of what became The Movement.
And on they marched to the steps of the building where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as president of the Confederacy, and where, on that day, King exhorted the great congregation of pilgrims in his measured cadences to keep on, keep on.
"How long? Not long, because truth pressed to earth shall rise again."
That night, the worst happened after the protecting federal army had departed. Ku Klux Klan nightriders shot Viola Liuzzo of Detroit, white, one of the volunteer shuttle drivers, shot her dead in her car in the Big Swamp area of Lowndes County. She was The Movement's 11th martyr.
No historical marker commemorates the spot where she died. But somebody, nobody seems to know who, sees to a floral wreath nearby, hanging on a fence.
It is there today.
by CNB