FIFTY YEARS AFTER
SELMA
The film Selma has
done part of the work for all of us. It
provides fact and fiction for remembering. It emphasizes the before and after
of March 7, 1965 on Edmund Pettus Bridge.
For a small number of viewers, the film may suggest what the work of the
present might entail.
I recall that we are still breathing fifty years after the
dramatic clash of KKK and CORE in Bogalusa, Louisiana; after the deaths of
Malcolm X, Viola Liuzzo, and Jonathan
Daniels; after the barely remembered fact that Wharlest Jackson was murdered in
Natchez, Mississippi after he was promoted to a job reserved whites; after demonstrations of outrage in the
Watts area of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago; after James M. Nabrit,
Jr. was appointed United States Ambassador to the United Nations and Congress
passed the Voting Rights Act. For a few of us, remembering is an invitation to
act.
I am moved to become involved in sponsoring out-of-school learning
activities for young people in New Orleans after reading a few sentences from
Donald P. Stone’s Fallen Prince: William
James Edwards (1990):
Selma had been of paramount importance to the Confederate
war effort. An ordnance manufacturing
depot located, hard upon the banks of the Alabama River, made it a strategic
shipping center. Benjamin S. Turner, the
Afro-American Reconstruction Congressman who served in the 42nd
Congress, was from Selma. Edmund Pettus,
U.S. Senator from 1896-1907 also hailed from Selma. Pettus proved a great obstruction to the
democratic aspiration of Afro-Americans.
In his view the “Negro is unfit for government.” In 1902 when Pettus was reelected to the
Senate, Edwards wrote: “No hope for colored schools. Senator Pettus reelected.” (47-48)
The heirs of Edmund Pettus now control the House of
Representatives and the Senate. Their unfiltered
hatred for the American President guides their efforts to minimize democratic
aspiration and to become killers of such American dreams that young African
Americans might wish to embrace. I feel obligated to teach these young people
that they are fit for government and fit to govern themselves and others. I
must be active in efforts to help young people do battle with all the forces
that tell them their lives count for naught in the American body politic.
Perhaps I should begin with helping them to make a critical analysis of
John Balaban’s poem “After The
Inauguration, 2013” (NYRB, March 19,
2015, p. 29), especially of its epigraph ---“Without the shedding of blood,
there is no remission of sins” (Hebrews, 9:22).
Fifty years after Selma, the battle to free the mind so that the body
might be free continues.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. March 5, 2015
BKNation Blog
