The New, Redeemed South Still Needs a New Deal : Liberation: It is not enough to possess the rights inherent in a democracy. We must use them to good advantage for all.

Braving billy clubs, water cannons and a volley of rocks and bottles from the sidelines, thousands of freedom-loving Americans marched from Selma to Montgomery 25 years ago this month. They were marching for civil rights and voting rights, for a new social compact in a nation whose soul was threatened by apartheid.

The reverberations of this march echo up and down history and across the earth. The Voting Rights Act was signed in ink by President Lyndon Johnson but was made possible by the blood of the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers. This legislation soon caused a sea of change in American politics by expanding and enriching the American electorate and transforming the Democratic Party.

Because we guaranteed the right of African Americans to vote against poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses, we removed the central hypocrisy of American democracy. We gave our nation the moral authority to challenge the Soviet Union to open up its society and share power with all of its people. The echo of this glorious freedom march is heard today from Selma to Soweto, from Managua to Manila to Moscow, from Tian An Men Square to Santiago to Prague.

“All life is interrelated,” Dr. Martin Luther King told us. “All humanity is involved in but a single process.” Today, the liberation process that was begun by the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, and sanctified by the blood of Medgar Evers, Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman and Viola Liuzzo (a white woman murdered while helping Selma marchers)--to name just a few--is triumphing all over the world.

But it is important to remember that there was nothing inevitable or easy about the success of the civil-rights movement. There were three contending positions, each embodied in a single individual. There was the white supremacist position, upheld by Alabama Gov. George Wallace, whose slogan, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” captured much of Southern white sentiment.

There was President Johnson, who said he supported voting rights but believed that Congress was too conservative to pass any major legislation. He told us that it was not yet time for real democracy in America.

And then there was Dr. Martin Luther King, who said that racial segregation and disfranchisement were morally wrong. If they were morally wrong, he taught us, they could not for long be politically right, for the arc of history is large but it bends inexorably toward justice.

Dr. King argued that we had to struggle for freedom, that we had to challenge oppression and bring to the surface the antagonisms and hatreds that were destroying the possibility of a democratic society. Only then could we exorcise the demons torturing our nation. Dr. King led us to victory in that historic, nonviolent struggle that would make so much difference for the chances of freedom on earth.

The measure of the change we made can be taken in the person of George Wallace himself. I went back to Selma and Montgomery recently to reflect on our past and to rejuvenate for the future. With a contrite heart, Wallace told me that he regrets the role he played during those years and wants instead to be remembered for the civil-rights position he came to later in his career.

In his last term as governor, Wallace appointed African Americans to his cabinet and an African American as a press aide. He also appointed numerous African American lawyers to the bench, giving him a record, he said, better than any other governor in the South.

The redemption of this man is an important milestone. But, 25 years after the wrenching drama took place, there is a new challenge in the New South, a place with the richest soil and the poorest people, the highest infant mortality rate, the greatest amount of poverty and the lowest amount of literacy.

The New South needs a New Deal. It has the greatest number of working poor families. Southern farms have been disproportionately hit by closures while Southern states are housing more and more toxic garbage.

If whites and African Americans can pay taxes together and play ball together, if we can vote together and run for office together, then we can tackle the problems afflicting the New South. It is not enough to possess the rights inherent in a democracy. We must use them to our advantage, to build a prosperous and healthy society for all. We owe the martyrs of the civil-rights movement, and ourselves, nothing less.