Forty-Eight Years After Selma: The New Fight for Voting Rights

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from Dissent magazine:


Forty-Eight Years After Selma: The New Fight for Voting Rights


[font size="1"]Photo by Peter Pettus, 1965, via Library of Congress[/font]


By Nicolaus Mills - March 20, 2013


Forty-eight years ago tomorrow, on March 21, 1965, I was part of the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March. There were only 3,200 of us who started out from Brown Chapel on that bright Alabama Sunday, but as far as the angry crowds along our march route were concerned, we were an invading army. We had no business protesting the discrimination that kept so many blacks off the Alabama voter rolls.

Two weeks earlier, civil rights protesters, among them future Georgia congressman John Lewis, had started out on the same march route, but they were badly beaten by Alabama state troopers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Among the white Alabamians I saw that afternoon, it was clear most still believed the Alabama state troopers had done the right thing. Their shouts of “white nigger” and the “Coonsville USA” sign I passed early in the march left no room for doubt.

I stayed in Alabama to help prepare the campsites for the following days of the march, which would not reach Montgomery until Thursday, March 25, and during that time none of the hatred I experienced at the opening of the march lessened. But when I returned to Providence, where I was in graduate school at Brown, I nonetheless felt hopeful. The Selma marchers I met, most of whom had simply dropped what they were doing and come south on their own, sent an unmistakable message. We, not the crowds jeering us, spoke for the future. It did not surprise me that in August Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This February, along with a group of historians and social scientists, I have put my name on an amici curiae brief in support of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is being challenged in a Supreme Court case, Shelby County v. Holder. Today, instead of feeling hopeful as I was in 1965, I am anxious. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/forty-eight-years-after-selma-moving-backward-on-voting-rights