Selma: A bridge not far enough?

“My daddy had an eighth-grade education,” said Moore, who was 16 in 1965. “They were very good people, but they didn’t have the education and were humiliated whenever they tried to vote.”

So when the nation’s eyes turned to Selma in March, 1965, she and her 15-year-old sister were already part of the months-old local campaign for black voting rights. When a state trooper shot and killed a protester, and black leaders decided to respond with a march from Selma to the Capitol in Montgomery, it was an easy call for the Thomas girls: They asked their parents for permission to go.

Today, 50 years on, the march, the bloodshed, the triumphant passage of the Voting Rights Act mere months later, have an air of inevitability. Selma is widely remembered as the crowning moment of the civil rights struggle.

“This one seemed to implant itself in the consciousness more than others,” said William Boone, a political science professor at Clark Atlanta University. “The cameras were there. The imagery of people armed with nothing but prayer and their spirit facing down people with clubs on horses … an event that ran counter to America’s sense of democracy.”

But reality is more nuanced. The heroism of the marchers masked growing divisions in the movement. Soon after Selma, conflicts between factions began to boil over, long-debated protest tactics were questioned more vigorously, and a militant, separatist tone took hold.

Fifty years have brought breathtaking progress: surges in black voter participation; the election of thousands of minority candidates and even a president whose mother was white and whose father was black.

But those years have also brought reversals and retrenchments: voter ID laws passed with exhortations about cubing fraud; curtailment of early voting; direct challenges to the Voting Rights Act that culminated in the Supreme Court striking down its linchpin provision.

So while Selma’s triumph, of moral and physical courage over brute hatred, is clear, its legacy is clouded – even for some who were there.

“When I look at it now, or the movie, I think about how much has not changed and all that we did,” Moore said. “So I don’t celebrate it. This is 50 years, they have done this celebration every year, but this is the first year I have gone back. I will be remembering it, not celebrating it.”

Troubled waters

The Selma campaign was a confounding one for Ralph David Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr.

After the highs of the 1963 March on Washington and the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act, the push for voting rights had stalled. Relations between movement leaders and Lyndon Johnson’s White House were complex and tense.

So, too, was the interplay between the SCLC and the younger crowd represented by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its fiery leader, John Lewis.

But none of that was visible on the ground to people like the Thomas girls.

Alice, a junior at Tipton High School, was a member of SNCC. She and her younger sister, Denise, had participated in several marches, getting arrested at least twice.

One arrest saw them dumped into a prison camp whose location she doesn’t know, even to this day.

“When you are 16 years old, you are not afraid of anything. You have the ability and energy to do it, because you are not afraid,” said Moore, who has lived in Atlanta since 1986. “But no one knew where we were. After three, four days there, it got scary.”

But not scary enough to deter them from protesting again once they were released. And not scary enough to prepare them for what would happen on the day that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

“(SNCC) warned us that something bad could happen, but I couldn’t imagine that they were gonna do what they did to us,” Moore said. “I never thought they would go that far.”

Bloody Sunday

Their parents reluctantly gave the girls permission to march, and their mother dropped them off that Sunday morning at the starting point, Brown Chapel AME Church.

Moore said SNCC officials briefed the marchers, who numbered, by various estimates, 500 or 600 people.

“We were basically given instructions to not fight back if something happened,” Moore said. “I was just expecting that day that we were going to be leaving Brown’s Chapel, camp out overnight, and get all the way to Montgomery.”

With Lewis of SNCC and Hosea Williams of the SCLC in the lead, the marchers walked from Brown Chapel to the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a former KKK grand dragon and spanning 1,200 feet across the Alabama River.

“We were talking as we walked,” Moore said. “We always talked and chatted. We would sometimes sing. But there was no disorder.”

What they saw when they reached the apex of the bridge silenced any chatter. Lewis later described a “sea of blue.” Not the river, but an estimated 150 state troopers and deputized “posse men,” as Moore called them – some of whom she knew personally.

“It was terrifying, the sight we saw,” Moore said. “People on horseback, with teargas, bats and whips. They charged and started beating and whipping us. There was a lot of hollering and screaming and blood. That was the first time I became frightened at what could have happened to us.”

Moore said she was never hit, but she was close enough to the front of the line to get the full brunt of the teargas. She made it back off of the bridge and down into the water, where she began to recover. Then she stumbled back to Brown Chapel.

“I just laid there until I could walk,” Moore said. “I can’t even explain how that teargas made me feel. I was choking.” She will never forget the look on her mother’s face when they met back at the church.

‘Anger had set in’

The televised images of marchers, Lewis prominent among them, being pursued and beaten by uniformed men with truncheons brought King himself to Selma to lead a second march on Tuesday, two days later. But he was under pressure from Johnson and a federal judge to wait until the courts could determine that the marchers were eligible for federal protection.

Once again, Moore was there as the marchers assembled at Brown Chapel.

“Anger had set in,” she said. “I was mad and anxious to go back and do what we set out to do. There was no hesitation on Tuesday.”

But, to the surprise of her and most marchers, King led them only as far as the foot of the bridge, where he asked them to kneel and pray. After that, he led them back into town. The day became known as “Turnaround Tuesday.”

That night, a group of white Unitarian Universalist ministers who had come to Selma after Bloody Sunday were beaten by a group of white men with clubs. One of them, James Reeb, died March 11.

That’s when Father Noel Burtenshaw, 26 and only three years removed from arriving in Atlanta from Dublin, got the call to Selma.

“I was coming back from a hospital visit,” Burtenshaw said. “I turned on the radio and James Reeb had been killed. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged ministers of the gospel to come and fill in for him. I found that challenge irresistible.”

It was a call he had expected from the time he knew he would be coming to the States. Back in Ireland, “we had seen a lot of movies about the conditions of black people in America, and it was stunning, especially in the South.”

The first time he met King was at the Dinkler Hotel in Atlanta, when he drove Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan there for a celebration of King’s Nobel Peace Prize. The second time was in Selma.

At that point, the SCLC was basically marking time until the federal court handed down a protective order.

“There were two black churches in Selma, and every morning, we would have a demonstration and march from one church to the other,” Burtenshaw said. “We would march to the cops, then stop. We would do that twice a day. Between that, we sang and prayed.”

By then, the posture of city officials had also shifted. Perhaps fearing another Reeb incident, Selma police officers were protecting the out-of-town protesters, even driving Burtenshaw and other priests each evening back to the Catholic hospital where they stayed.

Burtenshaw remained in Selma for about a week, returning to Atlanta before March 21, when the marchers set out for Montgomery once again.

Five days, 54 miles

For the third time, Moore and her sister were there. They were among 300 people who walked the entire 54 miles over five days. (The marchers’ numbers were limited by the court order that granted them the protection of federal agents.)

For the sisters, the march was exhilarating but grueling.

“That was the longest walk,” Moore said. “We were not properly dressed and clothed. We walked through some rain. We had extra socks and powder, but we did not have the proper shoes. I had blisters all over my feet.”

They did get to spend time with King, who made an effort to mingle with marchers each evening at their campsites. He signed the girls’ orange safety vests.

“It was exciting,” she said. “We learned about him in school.”

When they marched into Montgomery on March 25, “I felt we had accomplished something and everything was gonna be fine,” Moore said. But that bubble soon burst.

“As we waited for the buses to carry us home, they said that we were being threatened and that it was dangerous for us to go back home on the bus,” she said.

Viola Liuzzo, a white woman who traveled from Detroit to Selma to participate in the march, was killed driving black marchers back to Selma.

“I thought then, nothing had changed,” Moore said.

Very soon, though, a great deal changed. The televised attack on Bloody Sunday turned public opinion more aggressively toward civil rights, at least in the short term. It turned up enough political heat to get the Voting Rights Act passed and signed into law that August.

Among other things, the act required states with a history of blatant voter suppression to “pre-clear” any changes to election laws or procedures with the Justice Department. Alabama and Georgia were among those states.

In a few short years, black voter registration shot up from single digits to parity with whites. Thousands of cities and counties were forced to redraw voting districts or change procedures that were found to disenfranchise minority voters.

And now what?

But the Selma campaign also marked the beginning of the decline of the modern civil rights movement, say political scientists and historians.

“Bloody Sunday was a turning point in the civil rights movement around tactics, specifically non-violence.” said Andra Gillespie, an Emory University associate professor of political science. “The debate becomes more fraught.”

Within a year, Stokley Carmichael, a SNCC chairman and organizer who once embraced non-violence, began to champion self-defense and uttered the phrase “black power.” The involvement of whites began to be more aggressively challenged by a faction that championed self-determination over integration.

Even more fundamentally, once the Voting Rights Act was law, “people started saying, ‘What’s the civil rights movement for?’” said Gillespie.

With five decades of hindsight, Selma still stands as a shining moment, but many fear that the gains won with such sacrifice are eroding.

Less than a year into President Obama’s second term, it was an Alabama case, filed just 77 miles north of Selma, in which the Supreme Court struck down the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act.

“You have the Voting Rights Act that unfetters the black vote,” said Boone. “Now another narrative is being put out there: That aspects of the act are no longer needed because we’ve turned 180 degrees in the other direction. That’s not true. Voter list purges are ongoing. You’ll get Democrats and Republicans marching across that bridge this weekend; all the while, voting rights are being chipped away.”

Gillespie said she expects the issue to come up during the many speeches this weekend. As for the legacy of protest, Gillespie said she sees a through line from Selma to the recent protests across the country against police brutality.

The generation of students she teaches might see their contemporary battle as “one of incarceration and police brutality, but I wouldn’t be surprised if next year during the presidential election, ‘Black Lives Matter’ morphs into ‘Black Votes Matter.’”

Time to reflect

That, for those who believe the battle is not won, is a hopeful view. It is not a universal view.

Many who were there before, during and after the Selma campaign speak of the new generation as lacking any understanding of the civil rights struggle beyond the boldface names and events: King, March on Washington, sit-ins. Until the acclaimed movie “Selma,” some younger folks had never heard of the landmark marches.

“I was speaking at a college not too long ago and a young lady stood up and asked me, ‘Why are we still talking about what happened back then?’” said Juanita Abernathy, the widow of Ralph Abernathy. “I told her, ‘Darling, if you don’t know the past, you’re going to be doing the same thing again.’

“We walked those miles. That’s how we got the voting rights bill. We have opened doors, but they have not been told how the doors got opened. Not just the first, but the second, third and fourth. They just walk in and say, ‘I got in.’”

Abernathy will be in Selma this weekend. She is one of the last surviving women who marched on the front line from Selma to Montgomery.

Gillespie plans to attend as well. Boone does not, though he has attended at least one Selma commemorative march in the past. At that gathering, a white nun who had participated in one of the original marches posed a question that still haunts him:

“She said, ‘How many more times do we have to cross this same bridge?’”

Burtenshaw and his wife, Sue, are driving to Selma this weekend. He feels more confident that the movement achieved its ends.

“This is an important anniversary in my life,” Burtenshaw said. “I think we helped bring the walls down.”

Moore will be there, too, although she has stayed away from previous commemorations. “The things we did when I was 16 were special,” she said. “A celebration doesn’t move you to progress. What do we gain from a celebration if everything remains the same after it is over?”

These days, she said, “you have to beg people to vote.” In her eyes, Selma remains economically backward and racially polarized. “So I don’t think things have changed enough that we should be celebrating.”

She does find hope in Obama’s election and re-election, and she appreciates the activism that emerged from the Trayvon Martin and Ferguson incidents. But what she cherishes most about Selma’s legacy is far more personal: “My father was proud to be a registered voter up until the day he died at 90.”