Past Imperfect: A Bloody Sabbath, 1965
By William Jelani Cobb, AOL BlackVoices columnist
The adjective is terribly appropriate. March 7, 1965, came to be known as "Bloody Sunday" but it was one of many Sundays on which blood was shed to procure rights already guaranteed by the United States Constitution. Selma, Ala., had become the focal point of the drive to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South. On that day, the Rev. Hosea Williams and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led some 500 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There, on the way from Selma to Montgomery, they received a hostile greeting of tear gas and mounted state troopers. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized. Lewis' skull was fractured by a police baton. The protestors were targeted, attacked and some were killed by Klansmen.
Selma was a flashpoint in our history, but four decades after that particular Sunday, it is easy to lose sight of the significance of what happened there. It has become a cliché to point out that people "died for your right to vote" and today Selma blurs in the memory alongside the grainy catalog of images of police dogs, fire hoses, scowling sheriffs and the history-damned motel balcony in Memphis where Martin Luther King Jr. died.
More than a few of our national conversations question the relevance of brutal acts in our distant history. But Selma's blood-stained fingerprints are all over our 2005 realities.
We know the back story to that Sunday: the promises of Reconstruction curtailed by resurgent white violence after the presidential election of 1876; the rise of lynching and the implementation of poll taxes, Grandfather Clauses and literacy tests as tools to dissolve black political power; the black elected officials who were literally removed from office at gunpoint; and the near-century during which the constitution was effectively nullified in the South.
The struggle waged in Selma was real and distinct, and those martyrs who died for political equality had names, individual histories and salient life details. There's Jimmy Lee Jackson, the World War II veteran killed by police as he attempted to protect his mother in a march turned violent; the Rev. James Reeb, the white Unitarian clergyman clubbed to death by other whites for participating in the march; Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit housewife who came South to participate in the movement and was shot returning from Selma; and Vernon Dahmer, the successful black businessman killed in Mississippi two years later when his home was firebombed -- he urged the community to register to vote even as he lay dying from his burns.
And it was no coincidence that voting rights became the crossroads at which Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X -- diametric opposites in the view of the public -- found common ground. King came to Selma to lead a second march, signaling that the struggle would not be curtailed. Malcolm's arrival in Alabama -- just 17 days before his death -- marked the expanding horizon of his ideas and his appeal to a new generation of activists. For Dr. King, Selma was a microcosm of the South, where black political participation was forbidden by law and custom. Securing the right to vote was essential to the success of the movement he led. In the preceding year, Malcolm spoke in defense of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and delivered his famed "Ballot or the Bullet" ultimatum.
The efforts in Selma directly influenced the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which specifically outlawed the means by which black voters had been disfranchised. In 2005, that achievement is not a dry artifact from a bygone age of idealism. When the state of Florida wrongfully disfranchised thousands of black voters in 2000, it was the Voting Rights Act that provided a basis for legal redress. And as of 2001, there were 9,101 black elected officials in the United States -- with Mississippi holding the largest number of them.
But the story goes beyond black and white.
As early as 1884, the Supreme Court had declared that Native Americans could be denied the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act is still key to ensuring that Native American communities are politically represented. (In recent years, Native American voters have won legal victories against six different counties in South Dakota that drew voting districts that minimized their political power -- and thereby violated the Voting Rights Act.) New provisions to the Voting Rights Act have also ensured that Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hispanic and Filipino communities have access to translated voting materials -- allowing immigrant communities to participate in the political process. In short, the footprints of our past are visible in our present. They are not clichés, buried without antecedent, in the sands of our shifting history.
About the Author
William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of "The Essential Harold Cruse." He also posts articles at his Web site, www.jelanicobb.com. You can reach him at creative.ink@jelanicobb.com.