Blacks in Selma Are Still Battling for Equality--but Now It’s a Battle of Economics

The color of its leadership has changed after more than a century of white domination but the hub of the civil rights movement still is shackled, like much of rural Alabama, by the irons of a stagnant economy.

In the county where voting rights history was made in 1965, one in nine workers is looking for a job. The new majority-black commission pledges that everyone, regardless of race, has reason to hope for better times.

But signs of old racial animosities still flare, and Dallas County Commissioner D. L. Pope, a 78-year-old black farmer, offers a word of caution: “Nearly 25 years have passed, but there are many elderly people, and people who are not so elderly, brought up to feel inferior. That’s a carry-over from the plantation days. Once we bypass that, we’ll be able to move forward.”

Election Process Changed

It’s been 11 years since the Justice Department sued to force Dallas County to abandon an at-large system of electing the county commission, a system civil rights advocates say ensured the election of whites. Blacks make up 55% of the county’s 50,000 residents but less than 45% of registered voters.

The county fought the lawsuit, proposing its own district election plan that would have called for four districts--two predominately black, two mostly white--and a commission chairman elected by all county voters.

“It was fair,” said Probate Judge Johnny Jones, who by virtue of his office served as president of the commission under the at-large system. “The plan the commission devised was extremely fair.”

Meanwhile, black leaders, including Pope, devised an opposing plan calling for three black districts and two white districts with the commissioners choosing their chairman. The plan finally was approved in the federal courts last year, leading to elections that sent Pope, Erskine Minor and Perry Varner to the county courthouse.

Pope admits his sprawling district is “quite challenging” but defends the arrangement as fair to everyone. “I feel it is as just a plan as we could come up with. Blacks are in greater numbers as far as population is concerned, and we had to address the districts accordingly.”

The three were sworn in Jan. 16, the first blacks to serve on the panel since the Republican Party controlled the South after the Civil War.

The new commissioners promised to end what they saw as longstanding favoritism toward whites, but not everyone agrees that their early actions have been colorblind. One of their first acts was to remove the longtime license commissioner, who was white, and replace her with a black woman.

In addition, former Commissioner Bill Kendrick accused Pope of ordering the paving of driveways owned by blacks while ignoring those of whites, a critical issue in a mostly rural county where rain turns many roads into quagmires.

“I would like to see every road in Dallas County updated and paved wherever possible,” Pope said. “But do them all alike. Don’t pick out certain roads. Whites got preference in the past. The maps indicate that.”

The dispute led Pope to claim that Kendrick had threatened his life and Kendrick, who denied it, to claim that he in turn had received threats.

The new commissioners also found the same basic problems that plagued previous commissions and other counties in the depressed Black Belt, an area named for its rich, black soil but filled with poor, modestly educated or illiterate people, most of them black.

“Basically, we’re just trying to fulfill our major obligations and barely meet our payroll,” said Minor, a county employee for more than 12 years until his election to the commission.

Kendrick, who was replaced by Pope, understands the new commission’s dilemma. “We never had any extra money. The only thing the county commission can do is spend money frugally.”

Twenty-four years ago, Selma became forever linked with the struggle for racial equality when voting rights marchers were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by club-wielding police at the start of a march to Montgomery.

Two weeks later, the marchers were back--under federal protection and with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.--to cross the bridge and complete their march into history. A few months later, Congress approved the Voting Rights Act.

Since those turbulent times, both blacks and whites agree that Selma and Dallas counties have made racial gains, at least politically. But Minor says true equality won’t be a reality until blacks share in the county’s limited wealth.

“I have not seen much economic gain for the black community. My son is graduating from high school this year and he plans to go to college next year. When he graduates in four years, there will be nothing for him to come back to in this area. I don’t see any opportunity for jobs.”

Dallas County’s unemployment rate stands at 11.3%, more than twice the nation’s average and significantly higher than the state’s 7.3%.

“The birth of the movement began here,” Minor said, “but other counties are enjoying the fruits of our labor.”

Added Pope: “I don’t know of anyone in Dallas County or this country who is looking for more than his percentage of the pie. We can’t continue to see whites get all the better jobs.”