Salon.com > Selma

How to fight voter suppression

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:49:00 +0000

Forty-eight years to the day after Bloody Sunday, a seminal tragedy that paved the way for the Voting Rights Act, there are key lessons we must remember and heed, in order to strengthen that now-threatened legislation.

Every year, as February turns to March, thousands return to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the moment President Lyndon Johnson later compared to Lexington and Concord, calling it “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” But few know that this important event was the result of a series of accidents and almost did not occur. More important, it suggests that change in America is not inevitable and comes only when determined people risk their lives to achieve it.

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, peaceful demonstrators attempting to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge were attacked by Alabama State troopers armed with bats, electric cattle prods and tear gas. “I’m going to die here,” thought John Lewis, one of the march’s leaders, as he fell to the ground, concussed by a trooper’s bat.

Scalia’s ugly racial cynicism

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:24:00 +0000

Four slow-moving ambulances brought up the rear as student leader John Lewis led 600 peaceful protesters dressed for church on the voting rights march that would become known as Selma’s Bloody Sunday, on March 7, 1965. They stayed peaceful; law enforcement officials didn’t. Trampled by police horses, choked by tear gas, beaten with billy clubs – Lewis had his skull fractured – the marchers would need more medical help than the four cars could provide. The ugly melee made national news that night: ABC broke into its presentation of “Judgment at Nuremberg” with footage of the violence, and viewers couldn’t be entirely sure where Nazi atrocities ended and their own country’s began.

Now, not far from Selma, Shelby County, Ala., is trying to take the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act that Lyndon B. Johnson hustled through Congress after Bloody Sunday. Even though the act was reauthorized by a Republican-dominated Congress in 2006 on a 98-0 vote in the Senate (it was 390-33 in the House), and signed by President Bush, and even though its constitutionality has been upheld by the Supreme Court four times, there is evidence that the current right-wing court majority would like to overturn at least part of it. Court conservatives once represented a reaction against the court’s supposed overreach into realms best left to Congress, and its willingness to ignore earlier court decisions. Now they seem set to say Congress has no business here, and that their Supreme Court predecessors who upheld the act were either mistaken or the blinkered creatures of their idiosyncratic eras.

The inauguration of struggle

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 18:23:00 +0000

The people onstage at the Inauguration today, in spirit and in person, have always been a part of history in one form another, if you knew where to look and did the work. They've just never been this visible, nor this powerful.

A grandiose ceremony like an inauguration is about visibility as much as it is about repeating foundational rhetoric. Barack Obama's second inauguration explicitly made the argument that not only did all those citizens -- female and queer and brown and immigrant and belonging to different generations -- belong there, but that they had come there through a necessary struggle to make all of America what it promised to be.

The most important line in Obama's speech, to my mind, was, "For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing." Closing the gap between the country's pledge of liberty and equality and the lived reality of the centuries didn't just happen. First there were radical struggles, the ones Obama invoked when he said that the self-evident truth of equality "is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall." Yes, that's right: Our forebears. Our country. It's a vision that recognizes separate experiences yet suggests they are not forces for division, but for a more honest unity.