February 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Selma, 1965 and 2000: Stories of Struggle and Strength

Susan Starr, a community minister affiliated with the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, CA, is Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center which focuses on racial justice, advocacy, and public policy and publishes ColorLines.

As I write this on the holiday commemorating the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the television is on in the background. I should turn it off, because I am getting distracted by my anger. Each year at this time, I hear Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech used as liberal pap and an apologia for "colorblindness," and I swear each year I will spend the rest of January writing op-eds and sermons about how obscene and even sinful that desecration is. Instead, for the moment, I will content myself with recommending that you read about King from primary sources as much as possible, most especially his own writings. By the time he was in Selma in 1965, he had begun to understand and speak about the nexus of racism and poverty and the intractable nature of white privilege and those who would defend it to the death--including his own.

I have a personal connection with Selma then and now. In March of 1965, my father, who was a Unitarian Universalist minister, went to Selma to participate in the third voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the one that succeeded in leaving Selma and arriving 54 miles and five days later in Montgomery, the state capital. The first march, now known as "Bloody Sunday," was organized by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a protest against the murder of civil rights leader Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper in late February. Voter registration efforts had been increasingly militant in Selma for weeks, and more than 3000 demonstrators had been jailed. Malcolm X had spoken at a rally in Selma in February, warning that if county officials did not begin to cooperate with the registration of African American voters, he would return with an army of Black men who were not dedicated to the nonviolent civil disobedience strategy the Rev. Dr. King espoused.

On Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, 600 marchers on the Pettus Bridge were attacked by state troopers and local police who used tear gas, dogs, and billy clubs to turn them back. Because national media were present, the images ignited a national furor. The Dr. King called for a second march and national support. One person who responded was Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston who was working for AFSC. A US District Court judge issued an injunction against the second march, and Dr. King negotiated for a symbolic march that would only cross the bridge itself, not attempt to get any further. On the evening of this march of 1500 demonstrators, Jim Reeb was beaten on a Selma street by a group of young white men; he died two days later.

Several later, President Johnson proposed voting rights legislation in response to increasing pressure from African American religious leaders, now joined by a significant number of whites. Then the federal judge lifted the injunction against the Selma to Montgomery march, and Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard and sent troops, marshals, and the FBI to protect the marchers. The third march began on March 21st with 3200 demonstrators and ended on March 25th with more than 25,000. People came from all over the nation to express solidarity and be of service to the local efforts, one of them Viola Liuzzo, a housewife and member of a UU church in Detroit. Mrs. Liuzzo was shot to death in her car as she was shuttling people to and from the march sites. Several months after the Selma marches, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Bill of 1965.

It was because of my personal connection to the events of 1965 that I responded to a call this past August for activists to return to Selma to help unseat Mayor Joe Smitherman, who had been the mayor on Bloody Sunday and continued his racist regime in the city for 35 years. The reasons for his longevity in power are complex, including factors such as continuing disenfranchisement of African American voters, voter fraud, internalized racism resulting in a perception of powerlessness on the part of many of Selma's Black residents, and a Southern culture that adopted a surface civility around issues of race that attempted to mask the ongoing oppression of Black people by white-dominated power structures.

Volunteers in "Joe Gotta Go" campaign: Kevin, United Way, Boston; Susan Starr, Applied Research Center; "Mama" Lillie Brown, Birmingham; Libero Della Piana, APplied Research Center

Enter the "Joe Gotta Go" campaign. For months before the scheduled August city elections, Selma's African American activists had been organizing, registering voters, and taking to the streets in a reprise of the struggles of 1965, with many of the leaders of the campaign being people who had participated in the marches. The leaders of the campaign had decided it was time once again to "lead with race," and that caused great agitation in the city. Almost every day for months, two or three times a day, campaign workers as young as 14 and as old as 87 stood at the foot of the Pettus Bridge holding signs that said, "37 years of corruption and racism is enough" and "Remember the Blood," and shouted at passing cars, "Honk if Joe Gotta Go." Three African American candidates were on the ballot running against Smitherman, and none of them would endorse the campaign. In fact, two of them actively opposed it, one calling the activists "wild animals who give the white people of Selma reason to fear Black leadership." The third candidate, James Perkins Jr., merely tried to keep a low profile in regard to the campaign, making it clear that its leaders were not part of his own campaign, which was based on economic progress in Selma, not race. As a direct result of the registration and voter turnout efforts of the "Joe Gotta Go" campaign, however, Perkins forced Smitherman into the first run-off of his infamous political career.

I returned to Selma for the week preceding the run-off vote in September, this time accompanied by an African American coworker from the Applied Research Center, to a situation entirely different from the one I'd left in August. People were beginning to arrive from all over the country to help, national media had begun to pay attention, and the number of honking horns at the foot of the Pettus Bridge had grown geometrically. The excitement and fear and passion and solidarity I shared with the people of Selma that week had as deep an effect on my life as being on the 1965 march did on my father's. The battle had grown heated. A car used in the campaign had been firebombed, and local police insinuated that it was either a "publicity stunt" on the part of the campaigns leaders or simply the work of young vandals and unrelated to the campaign. The campaign's most visible leader, noted civil rights attorney Rose Sanders, had her life threatened in a widely-disseminated flyer headlined "Rest in Peace, Rose." Activists at the Pettus Bridge and in front of city hall were bombarded with racist hate speech from pedestrians and motorists--most often the standard "nigger lovers go home" aimed at white volunteers. But we knew we had a chance to win, so none of that mattered. And win we did. Five minutes after the polls closed, Smitherman conceded. Within 30 minutes after that, the streets of downtown Selma were literally unpassable, as thousands of folks poured out the cars and on foot, laughing, crying, honking, and shouting, "Joe Gone, Joe Gone."

In the time since that great day, there has been good news and bad news. Part of the good news is that the new mayor, James Perkins, is "coming out" about race. Shortly after his election, a monument was dedicated on city property, in front of the city-owned Smitherman Museum, dedicated to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a man who had been a leader in launching the Ku Klux Klan and in the efforts in Selma to save the Confederacy. Perkins has worked hard to have the monument moved inside of the museum and to have the whole story of Forrest's bigotry told in the exhibit. Part of the bad news is that the National Voting Rights Museum, whose staff were among the leaders of the "Joe Gotta Go" campaign, was vandalized twice in December, and more than 30 original and irreplaceable photographs that were part of an exhibit commemorating the 1965 marches were destroyed. Once again, the local police claim it was either a "publicity stunt" or the work of a lone young man, and unrelated to Selma's ongoing racial struggles. The best news is that Selma's African American activists have never given up or given in, through decades of violence and oppression and struggle.

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