SELMA COMMEMORATIONS
Saturday
• Parade
• Street festival
• Commemoration with remarks by President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush
Sunday
• Church services
• Rally
• Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing march
Monday
• Selma-to-Montgomery march begins at Edmund Pettus Bridge
March 13
• Rally at Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery
They only lasted minutes, but the beatings of civil rights marchers in Selma, Ala., permanently seared the inhumanity of Southern segregation onto the American conscience.
The images were televised and captured in photographs: Police tear-gassed kneeling protesters, clubbed them and attacked them on horseback on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Five decades later, many were struck by the resemblance as police lobbed tear gas at protesters last year in Ferguson, Mo., after the police shooting death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown.
President Barack Obama and some surviving marchers are going back to Selma this weekend to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that “Bloody Sunday” assault, and to talk about how the country has — and has not — changed since then.
Several Ferguson protesters also plan to be there, hoping to ensure that more Americans will draw parallels between yesterday’s and today’s struggles.
“It is clear that the struggle continues,” said human rights attorney Nicole Lee, who was in Ferguson during the unrest after police decided not to charge police Officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s death.
Georgia congressman John Lewis, who as a student activist was severely beaten in Selma, also sees parallels between the 1965 marches and the #BlackLivesMatter movement that sprang up after Brown’s death. He also sees a major distinction.
“The only thing that is so different (is that) today, I don’t think many of the young people have a deep understanding of the ways of nonviolent direct action,” Lewis said.
Other Selma veterans say they fear their sacrifices are being wasted by those who fail to vote, leading to lack of representation in government and on police forces.
“Selma just gave us the right to vote,” said Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest aides and an organizer in King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “But if you don’t vote, and don’t take advantage of that right, you’re still living in a pre-Selma age.”
African-Americans voted at a higher rate than non-Hispanic whites in 2012 — 66.2 percent versus 64.1 percent — with Obama on the ballot. But voter turnout was down in last year’s midterm elections roughly three months after Brown was killed, and dismal in local elections. In Ferguson, fewer than 1,484 of the town’s 12,096 registered voters cast ballots in the last mayoral election.
Back in 1965, the SCLC targeted Selma as an area where it should challenge the lack of voting rights, Young said, and King called it “the most segregated city in America.”
Young said the group’s leaders came up with the idea to march from Selma to Montgomery at the funeral for Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, who died a few days after being shot in the stomach by State Trooper James Bonard Fowler while trying to protect family members during a melee that broke out after a February 1965 voting rights protest in Selma.
After police attacked the marchers, shocking images were broadcast nationwide. ABC interrupted its Sunday night movie, “Judgment at Nuremberg,” to air 15 minutes of uninterrupted footage of the Selma attacks.
“They broke into Hitler and the Nazi persecution of the Jews to (show) the persecution of African-Americans by state troopers in Alabama,” Young said. “People made the connection that this cannot be allowed to happen.”
A few days after the Bloody Sunday assaults, King led a second march to the scene of the violence. A third march, on March 21, completed the journey from Selma to Montgomery. Eight days later, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress, and compared Selma to some of America’s Revolutionary battles.
Five months later, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ushered millions of African-Americans and other minorities onto voter rolls in the South.
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