March 1-Selma, AL and “Bloody Sunday”

It is POURING rain…thunder and lightning…tornado warnings RIGHT HERE. Evidently hot, humid air fires up tornados. A bit spooky but we’ll update the blog while we wait for clearer weather so we can drive on to Montgomery. The weather channel says the storm will keep up all afternoon. It’s much too wet to drive the motorhome.
We just got back from a VERY interesting morning at the Selma National Voting Rights Museum. There was a busload of kids looking around and listening to speakers. Again, we looked pretty pale. Gene stepped right in and listened to the speakers. I wandered around and looked at all the exhibits. There are some amazing things on display—some very unsettling. They have a real KKK white uniform (really creepy), and a uniform that a policeman wore as they confronted the marchers with baseball bats and night sticks. I had a long chat with a woman who was working at the museum about the fact that there are still many more instances of outright racism than I was aware of. She is in the process of trying to buy a piece of property from a “gentleman” who will not sell to a black. She has to have a white friend help her with the transaction. I had NO idea that this sort of thing still happens. How naive! The women that we talked to were great. We confessed ignorance and curiosity and they were happy to talk and explain. One of the women was 8 years old in 1965 when her Grandmother took her to the voting rights march that turned ugly. She was telling the children about hearing the people screaming, bones breaking from being hit, and the reasons why they called it Bloody Sunday. Obviously, Gene and I knew about these things happening, but it was surreal to meet someone my own age (pretty close) that actually lived it. She also spoke about being outside Carter’s Drugs (in Selma) and peering in the window, watching the white kids twirling on shiny stools at the soda counter eating ice cream. She couldn’t go inside of course. It’s still hard for me to believe that things aren’t better yet.
I didn’t realize that blacks had the right to vote after the Civil War but it was not protected by the constitution. The 15th amendment which forbids any government in the US from preventing a citizen from voting based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude (slavery) was ratified in 1870. One hundred years after the Civil War however, in many parts of the country the 15th amendment had been nullified by discriminatory laws, intimidation, violence, and fear which kept many blacks from the polls. The situation was particularly bad in Selma, where blacks made up more than half the population but only made up about 2% of the registered voters.
In January of 1963, Selma citizens organized a voter registration class for blacks and by February others were in Selma to assist with registration. During 1963 and 1964, although they brought potential voters by the hundreds to the registrar's office in the courthouse in Selma, they were unable to get them registered to vote. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Selma in January of 1965 to lead the drive for the vote. In January and February 1965, protests were held in Selma to bring attention to this violation of rights. The protests were met by violence by Sheriff James Clark and his deputies. On February 17, a small civil rights march ended in the shooting of Jimmy Lee Jackson who died from his wounds several days later. The civil rights activists decided to hold a memorial march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery on March. 7.
This is from Wikipedia: “Approximately 600 marchers started out on the march that Sunday morning. When the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, they were met by about 200 state troopers, and Sheriff Clark and his deputies mounted on horseback, all armed with tear gas, night sticks and bull whips. The marchers were ordered to turn back. When they did not, they were attacked by the law enforcement officers. The air filled with tear gas and marchers were beaten, whipped and trampled by the horses. Finally, they turned around and returned to Selma. 17 marchers were hospitalized.
Dr. King and his supporters filed a federal lawsuit requesting to be permitted to proceed with the march. On March 21, the march began again, with federal troops protecting the marchers, and proceeded to Montgomery. In Montgomery, a rally was held on the steps of the state capitol. However, within hours of the end of the march, 4 Ku Klux Klan members shot and killed Viola Liuzzo, a white 39-year-old civil rights volunteer from Detroit, Michigan, who had come to support the Alabama African-Americans. President Lyndon Johnson said, "Mrs. Liuzzo went to Alabama to serve the struggle for justice. She was murdered by the enemies of justice who for decades have used the rope and the gun and the tar and the feather to terrorize their neighbors." In August, 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.
According to a report of the Bureau of the Census from 1982, in 1960 there were 22,000 African-Americans registered to vote in Mississippi, but in 1966 the number had risen to 175,000. Alabama went from 66,000 African-American registered voters in 1960 to 250,000 in 1966. South Carolina's African-American registered voters went from 58,000 to 191,000 in the same time period.” I have no idea how many blacks are registered now…but there certainly was an amazing increase.