A time that I had gladly forgotten - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

I was surprised, and a little shocked, to see last Sunday that they were marking the 60th anniversary of the famous march in Selma, Alabama. How did I get so old!

 

I was a mere teenager when the march took place. My younger colleagues today couldn’t imagine so much has changed over the years. First there were the civil rights protests. Though all males had been given the right to vote after the northern states defeated the southern states in 1865, southern governments had found clever ways to prevent former slaves from voting. One was that everyone had to register to vote and then that Black voters had to prove they could read. Registrars made people demonstrate their reading ability by something like reciting the U.S. constitution. They’d keep making the test more difficult until finally the person would fail.

 

After hearing about the 60th anniversary of the Selma march, I took the DVD of the movie Selma off my movie shelf and watched it again. I was reminded that Selma was a particularly provocative part of the south because 50 per cent of the population was Black, but only two per cent of the Black population could vote.

 

It was against this background that civil rights leaders like Rev. Martin Luther King, Ralph  Abernathy and a young John Lewis (later a U.S. senator) decided to mount a protest. On March 7, 1965, Abernathy, Lewis and 600 more protesters marched peacefully out of Selma, bound for the state capital. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, police under the command of Chief Jim Clark, attacked them with clubs and tear gas, both on foot and on horseback. Dozens of the protesters were injured.
But TV cameras were there to record the mayhem and broadcast it across America and around the world. Upset viewers watched, and organized in solidarity with the protestors.

 

King had missed the first march because he was home trying to the patch up holes in his marriage with his wife Coretta (he may have been a minister, but he was not a faithful husband). He arrived to be part of a second march with, by now, many thousands more protesters. Again they met the police on the bridge. The police pulled back, but didn’t disburse. King knelt and prayed and then, seeking to avoid more violence, called off the march.

 

Among the northern white people who had joined the protest was Rev. James Beck from Boston. Later that night, he was attacked and killed by violent southerners.

 

Meanwhile, King and other leaders of the march appeared in front of a judge who granted them permission to march. On the third march, on March 21, 25,000 people walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge without any interference from police. Over the next three days they marched all the way to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, and then proceeded to register to vote.
In the meantime, Governor George Wallace of Alabama had met with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and urged him to disallow the march. Johnson, who had seen the television coverage of the first bloody march, refused. In fact, although he had argued that he had his own agenda and had earlier refused to recognize King’s requests to change laws, he now capitulated and passed legislation to guarantee the right of southern Blacks to vote.

 

It was a major part of the desegregation movement. I also remember how U.S. troops were assembled to help little girls from Black neighbourhoods attend newly-integrated schools.

 

The battle went on for years and Wallace unsuccessfully sought the United States presidency as a Democratic Party candidate three times, and once as an American Independent Party candidate.

 

How much had changed was demonstrated on another television show when the host visited a restaurant in Selma. In the 1960s, white people could get food through large take-out windows in the front. Black residents were served through a small window in the back of the building. The restaurant is now owned by a Black woman. The window in the back is now boarded up.
There were other things in those turbulent times that are remembered by people of my generation. The demonstrations for integration were followed soon after by protests against U.S. participation in the Vietnam war. The U.S. still had the draft at that time and Canada gained some valuable new citizens when draft avoiders moved north of the border. 

 

But, recently, the relative calm has been shattered. Current U.S. president Trump’s  Supreme Court nominees drastically weakened its once-successful protections for voters of colour - a situation Congress has repeatedly failed to fix, despite having the ability do so. 

 

We are living through “interesting” times again. I could have gladly survived without that.