Selma's March Backward - Bloomberg View
This weekend, President Barack Obama and more than 90 members of Congress are gathering in Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday -- the attempted civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery that was violently turned back just... The beatings were replayed in America’s living rooms that evening on the national news, and the resulting outcry led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which put an end to state laws that kept blacks from the polls and transformed American... This winter is also the 25th anniversary of another big event in Selma history, the protests and boycott that left Selma’s schools resegregated and the town polarized. The Selma I arrived at in October 1989 (after driving from California with all my possessions packed into a red Ford Festiva) was a struggling, divided little city that nonetheless seemed like it had at least a shot at fulfilling the promise of... Selma had about 24,000 people, and had recently shifted from a narrow white majority to a narrow black majority. Politics remained very much a black-white thing, with the same mayor as in 1965 (it hadn’t been an uninterrupted reign) and whites still in the majority on the City Council. But there were powerful, independent black political figures in town, too, notably state Senator Hank Sanders, his wife Rose Sanders, and their law partner J. L. Chestnut Jr. Chestnut. Source: www.bloombergview.com
