Wonderful as the idea of a 50th anniversary weekend commemorating Bloody Sunday seemed, the risk was that it would only be a look backward. Connections needed to be made with what is going on now, and they were. It was thrilling to be there, to take a long view back and remember the sacrifices of so many, sung and unsung. But Selma is a story of before and after—and now.
Back then, voter registration efforts in Selma were met with police violence and culminated in not one, but three marches attempting to reach Alabama’s capitol of Montgomery: the first ended with billy clubs, tear gas, and aggressive state troopers on horseback; the second began with prayer on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and ended with a solemn retreat to Selma; and the third, begun on March 21, 1965, finally reached the capitol on March 25.
Despite the passage of monumental federal civil rights legislation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the right to vote had been left out entirely. Given the mass arrests and violent resistance that met those who nonetheless tried to register and the volunteers who tried to help them, it was clear that further federal legislation focused on voting was necessary. The experience of the Selma marchers was a wake-up call to the nation and a cautious President Lyndon Johnson, who sent what was to become the Voting Rights Act to Congress on March 17, 1965. It was signed into law on August 6. Recalling ‘‘the outrage of Selma,’’ Johnson celebrated the right to vote as ‘‘the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.’’
Since then, the voter registration and participation rates of African Americans and other minorities have soared, and the Voting Rights Act was largely responsible. When the Supreme Court handed down the Shelby County decision in June of 2013, one of the most instrumental provisions of the Voting Rights Act was gone. It is not merely symbolic that Shelby County and Selma are about 75 miles apart—75 miles and four or five income brackets. The people of Selma have always needed the protection of the federal courts; Shelby County has now used to courts to get out from under its civil rights obligations.
Now there is new federal civil rights legislation pending in Congress to get back some approximation of what Shelby County took away—the ability of the federal government to evaluate voting changes before they go into effect, before they impede a citizen’s right to vote, sometimes irrevocably. And in Selma, the importance of this new struggle—to get the bill passed in a fractured and fractious Congress—was in the air. People weren’t just looking backward; they were aware that there’s still a lot more to do, and complacency is not an option. President Obama said it well on Saturday:
“The Voting Rights Act was one of the crowning achievements of our democracy, the result of Republican and Democratic effort. President Reagan signed its renewal when he was in office. President Bush signed its renewal when he was in office. One hundred Members of Congress have come here today to honor people who were willing to die for the right it protects. If we want to honor this day, let these hundred go back to Washington, and gather four hundred more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore the law this year.”
Amazingly, both Senators Rob Portman and Jeff Sessions, who were in Selma over the weekend, told reporters they didn’t know much about the bill so couldn’t say whether they would vote for it. The Voting Rights Amendment Act has been pending since early 2014. Sessions is from Alabama. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only African-American Republican in the Senate, said something even more incredible: “The issue of voting rights legislation and the issue of Selma, we ought to have an experience that brings people together and not make it into a political conversation.” So, we should go to Selma and not talk about voting rights?
The view from the Edmund Pettus Bridge was of tens of thousands of people, in front of me and behind me, black and white, young and old, converging on a place with a storied past. We all had our own reasons for being there, but I’d like to think that most of us left with a sense of renewal, eager for as much progress to be made after 2015 as there was after 1965. History is never a straight line. Setbacks are inevitable, but we often have it in our power to meet them and defeat them. This is one of those times.