When you stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as trucks and cars lumber past, the engines shake the air around you and the pavement rumbles under your feet. It feels like the heartbeat of history.
It takes little effort to blot the traffic from your mind and to imagine, instead, the footsteps of marchers, and then the hiss of tear-gas canisters and the crack of batons. The wind fills your ears as you walk to the top. Your path rattles underneath. It seems like God is pounding his fist.
Selma lived through “Bloody Sunday” nearly 50 years ago and revisited it this weekend, when “Selma” premiered at the Selma Walton Theater, a few blocks from the bridge. The movie, much of which was filmed in metro Atlanta, tells the story of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights heroes, including U.S. Rep. John Lewis, former Atlanta Mayor and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young and the late Revs. Hosea L. Williams and Ralph David Abernathy.
The movie has been nominated for four Golden Globes (the awards air at 8 p.m. Sunday on NBC) and has generated considerable Oscar buzz, but, of course, Hollywood was the last thing on anyone’s mind in 1965.
“I was afraid,” said Charlotte Griffeth, a University of Georgia graduate who has spent most of her life in her native Selma. “One evening my aunt came to tell us that my mother had been jailed and would not be coming home. I can remember my brother being afraid to drive at night.”
A past principal of the town’s middle school, Griffeth hopes the film will resonate with young people.
“Selma has given much to the world,” said Griffeth, who was one of the volunteers working at the theater Friday to welcome and direct patrons. “It is essential our students learn about the impact Selma had on the movement.”
To that end, Cynthia Harris brought her 12-year-old son Michael to see the movie.
“We have a ways to go but we’re slowly making strides to get there,” she said.
“To be continued,” Michael added.
Selma native Henry Allen was about 18 at the time of the marches. He grew up about a mile from downtown, in a poor but integrated neighborhood.
“We could play ball together, but we knew we could not go anywhere together or socialize. All we knew was segregation,” said Allen, who recalls one of his white boyhood friends wondering, “Why can’t we go to school together? I don’t understand.”
Years after the Voting Rights Act spurred by the Selma movement became law, the spectre of Jim Crow lingered like an angry haint. Allen, who became Selma’s first black firefighter and later its first black fire chief, retired in 2009 after 37 years to a proclamation from the mayor and a standing ovation at City Hall. But he remembers fighting a fire in 1972, the year he was hired, as the elderly white homeowner spat racial slurs.
“Every time I saw racism, it was fear,” Allen said.
A number of screenings of "Selma" played for free over the weekend and more are planned, courtesy of Paramount Pictures (if you happen to be heading that way, see selmawaltontheater.com for future show times). Selma Mayor George Patrick Evans, one of the many local dignitaries in attendance, welcomed the crowd before the first screening Friday afternoon.
“It’s a proud day, in my opinion, to have a movie done about Selma,” he said.
For the Rev. B.L. Tucker, a City Council member, the movie brought back memories.
“I was there on Bloody Sunday,” he said of the March 7, 1965, attack on peaceful marchers by law enforcement officers. “I got beat up. I was struck upside the head.”
City Council member Angela Benjamin was moved by the scene in the film where Mahalia Jackson, played by Ledisi Young, sings to King, played by David Oyelowo, to buoy him.
“My mom was jailed and tear-gassed,” Benjamin said. “She was a phenomenal singer and she kept people’s spirits up.”
Benjamin’s mother, Rose White, died last year but “would have been in absolute tears” at the premiere, her daughter said.
Some in Friday’s audience were proud not only that the movie had been made, but at their role in the project.
Connor Carraway and his mom, Connie Morrow, drove over from Montgomery to see “Selma” in Selma. They were cast in the movie — he played a police officer and she was a church member.
“It’s a masterpiece,” said Morrow, becoming emotional. “Alabama should be proud. We made it for the whole nation.”
Carolyn Calhoun Bates and Bo Spencer also were in the movie. She played a church member and he was cast as one of the troopers who attacked marchers with billy clubs.
“It was hard to play that kind of role,” he said.
For Bates, who was 8 at the time of the movement, it was a calling.
“I saw what happened on that bridge,” she said. “Tear gas was all over Selma, Ala.”
Although she had to attend segregated schools as a child, she was determined to get an education to escape a future of picking cotton. Today, she is a member of the Dallas County school board.
“It sort of patched up some of the ill feelings,” she said of the movie. “We have a chance to get together.”
Bates and Spencer are both Selma natives but met only last summer, on the “Selma” set. After the Friday screening, they caught up to exchange email and Facebook information. She chuckled at the notion of a friendship between a 58-year-old black woman and a 31-year-old white man happening 50 years ago.
“This is the theater I wasn’t allowed to sit in when I was a child,” she said of the building she had just exited. “When I was allowed, it was only to sit in the top.”
Noted her new friend, Spencer: “Now you can sit anywhere you want.”
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