Blacks Celebrate Gains as Selma March Revisited

Thirty years after the bloody march that shamed Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act, veterans of the civil rights movement gathered Sunday to celebrate the political and social strides African Americans have made.

But in the midst of celebrating, they warned of different forces--including crime and voter apathy--that they say threaten black communities today. And they decried efforts in Congress, California and elsewhere to dismantle affirmative action and other programs that made gains possible.

In a stark demonstration of how much and how little things have changed, police on Sunday escorted an estimated 1,500 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where hundreds of civil rights workers were brutally beaten on March 7, 1965, on what became known as Bloody Sunday.

Before the re-enactment, which drew civil rights marchers from across the country, Mayor Joe Smitherman handed out keys to the city to black dignitaries. Several of the honorees had been brutalized 30 years ago when Smitherman was a young mayor and a segregationist.

The beating of the marchers in 1965 by state troopers and Dallas County sheriff’s deputies was televised, horrifying the nation. A week later, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had earlier told Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that there was not enough support in Congress for the Voting Rights Act, went on television and compared the Selma debacle to major civil war battles and repeated the civil rights refrain: “We shall overcome.”

Johnson also ordered federal troops to protect marchers a week later as they crossed the bridge and walked to Montgomery, where they gave Alabama Gov. George Wallace a list of grievances.

Five months later, Johnson signed legislation that did away with literacy tests, poll taxes and other means that had been used in the South to deny voting rights to African Americans.

After he received the key to the city, Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said: “This is quite a distinction from the welcome given to the first president of the SCLC in 1965. I take it very seriously because it represents the change that has taken place over these 30 years because of our struggles.”

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), noting the presence of three other black congressmen in the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where the commemoration was held, said: “Thirty years ago, many of us could not register to vote in the state of Alabama.”

He and a number of other speakers, however, lamented that blacks in large numbers do not exercise the right to vote that many died for in the 1960s.

“We’re sitting on our butts,” said Lewis. “We need to get off our butts. If 19,000 of us had gotten off our butts on Election Day, Newt Gingrich would not be (House) Speaker and Bob Dole would not be the majority leader.”

Even Smitherman, the only white person on stage during a morning worship service, joined other speakers in criticizing “those congressmen in their Brooks Brothers suits” who he said want to drop the burden of social programs on local governments while they give tax cuts to corporations.

“I grew up on welfare,” he said. “My mother was a widow woman with six children. . . . You’ve got to have these programs and teach people how to get off of them.”

Speakers such as Lowery, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Lewis said the backlash against affirmative action, welfare and redistricting threatens to erase the progress African Americans have made over three decades.

Jackson compared today’s political climate to the period after Reconstruction, when blacks were purged from Congress.

“We’re not asking for special privileges,” Lowery said. “Just level the playing field, and we will make it. The rage of the proverbial angry white male upset over perceived inequities that benefit racial minorities and women is misdirected.”

Instead of blaming government programs that help minority groups, critics should unite with those groups to combat an exploitative economic system that is not designed to promote full employment and decent wages, Lowery said.

Any attempt to reform welfare must include “corporate welfare,” he said.

The route the marchers took to the bridge in a drizzly mist could have been a trip through time. Downtown Selma seems in many ways to be frozen in 1965. Except for signs of age and decay, the scarred and lifeless storefronts have changed little.

John Gary, a marcher from Birmingham who said he was present in 1965, blamed the arrested development on racism. Whites largely abandoned the city after the turbulence of the 1960s, he said, thrusting it into decline.

He and others who said they still hold Smitherman responsible for what happened in 1965 charged that his leadership, and black acquiescence to it, contributed to the lack of progress in the city, which now has a black majority.

“After what happened in 1965, I would never have voted for him,” said Davis Jordan, also of Birmingham.

“You can just about look at it now and think about what was here,” said Gary as he walked down the street to the bridge. The major difference, he said, was that in 1965, downtown, while segregated, was a livelier, busier place.

On Sunday, the atmosphere in some ways was almost carnival-like. Booths were set up near the bridge, where vendors sold T-shirts, trinkets and snacks. One vendor wore clown makeup.

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Selma: 30 Years Later

Facts and figures about Selma and Dallas County, launching spot of the historic 1965 march to Montgomery that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act: Dallas Co. Population: 48,130* Blacks: 58% Whites: 42% Black Registered Voters, 1965: 250 Black Registered Voters, 1995: 20,573 Black Elected Officials, 1965: 0 Selma City School Board, 1995: 6 Blacks, 5 Whites Dallas Co. School Board, 1995: 3 Blacks, 2 Whites Selma City Council, 1995: 5 Blacks, 4 Whites Dallas Co. Commission, 1995: 3 Whites, 2 Blacks * 1990 census

Source: Associated Press