Selma

The things you see as you approach a town can inform you about the place.  I hadn’t done any prior research on Selma, or any of the cities I planned to visit, but after Birmingham and Montgomery, I had a feeling Selma was going to be very different.  It was.  Little announces the upcoming town of Selma on U.S. Route 80: billboards, businesses on the fringe, lanes added to the road.  It is cotton country, a handful of souvenir shops and bam! the Edmund Pettus bridge. 

I stopped on the county side of the bridge where a little park had been constructed with wooden stairs and landings took you down the embankment, under the bridge, by the Alabama river.  There was trash down there and the wooden structures were rickety and weather worn.  It needed a good coat of wood preservative.  My guess is money had run out for  upkeep of the park.  I took a picture of a little seen view of the bridge, the underside.

The Edmund Pettus bridge is on solid footing.  I’d say neither the name of that bridge nor the bridge itself are going anywhere. 

Compared to Birmingham and Montgomery, Selma is a small city.  It has been losing population for 58 years.  At its peak in 1960 over 28,000 people lived in Selma.  Now fewer than 18,000 call it home. 

It’s a small town in an agricultural area trying to make it.  Bush Hog, maker of ag equipment, has a presence there along with a paper mill owned by International Paper.  There are small manufacturers like Peerless Pump Company, Plantation Patterns and American Apparel.  Selma’s most recent efforts at development are devoted Civil Rights tourism, which is what brought me there. 

Selma was both mightily attacked and staunchly defended during the Civil War because was one of the South’s main military manufacturing centers.  The Selma iron works and foundry produced munitions and made possible the building of iron clad Confederate warships there.  But of course, it all fell to the Union.  Those enterprises never recovered.

After the Civil War Selma became the county seat of Dallas County and a new county courthouse was built there in 1866.  While the city developed its own police force, the newly built courthouse and grounds were placed under the jurisdiction of the county and its Sheriff.  The courthouse became the scene of numerous “spectacle” lynchings.  Mobs would sometimes take prisoners from the nearby jail and lynch them before trial.  In 1892 Willy Web was arrested in Waynesville, put in jail in Selma,  supposedly to protect him before trial, only to be hauled out of jail hours later by an angry mob (and a complicit jailer) and hanged right there on county property outside the jail with a crowd of locals watching.

The next year a lynch mob numbering 100 seized Daniel Edwards from the Selma jail, hanged him from a tree, and fired multiple rounds into his body for allegedly being intimate with a white woman.  Pinned to his back was a note that read “This was the work of 100 best citizens of the South Side.” 

In 1935, Joe “Spinner” Johnson, leader of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, was beaten by a mob in his own field, taken to the jail in Selma, and beaten more there.  His body was later discovered in a field near Greensboro.  I couldn’t escape the horror of lynching no matter where I went. 

Despite those historical events, Civil Rights tourism in Selma is all about the Edmund Pettus bridge.

First a little about the bridge’s namesake.  Edmund Pettus grew up in Alabama, got a law degree, left to fight in the Mexican-American War, hung around to fight Indians too, came back to become a circuit judge, then resigned and settled back in Dallas County to work as a lawyer.

Pettus was enthusiastic about the Confederate cause and protecting the institution of slavery, which went hand in hand.  He was a delegate to the secession convention in Mississippi, where his brother John was governor.  Pettus organized the Confederate 20^th Alabama Infantry, and became its lieutenant colonel.

He fought all over the South, ending up as a brigadier general.  He was captured three times and managed to escape twice.  In custody after the surrender at Appomattox, he was paroled, later pardoned, and went home to resume his law practice in Selma. 

After the end of Reconstruction, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877 (think of the end of martial law) Pettus served as chair of Alabama’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention.  He was also named Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.  He became rich and bought farmland.

At 1987 at the age of 75 he won a seat in the United States Senate by using his position in the Alabama Klan.  He campaigned on his vocal opposition to the constitutional amendments after the war that made slaves free citizens and gave them the right to vote.  He was re-elected to a second term and died in office in 1903.  As a senator Edmund Pettus was described as “the last of the Confederate brigadiers to sit in the upper house of Congress.

So, it was appropriate that Bloody Sunday occurred on Edmund Pettus’ bridge, almost as if the Civil War brigadier general was still fighting to keep black people in their place a hundred years later.

The Dallas county Voters League began a voter registration campaign in Selma in 1963 and had been working hard for two years to overcome the obstacles both state and county officials put before black voters before SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, joined them in a renewed effort to register black voters in 1965. 

Finding resistance by white officials intractable, many activists of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined them.  This brought prominent civil rights activists to Selma.  Local and regional protests began, with 3,000 people arrested by the end of February.  Martin Luther King Jr. joined their efforts, and talked to President Lyndon Johnson about his plan a strategy for drawing attention to the injustice of literacy tests in particular, throughout the South, and his decision to use Selma to achieve that objective.  The situation in Selma grew tense.

On February 26, 1965 Jimmie Lee Jackson, an African American civil rights activist in nearby Marion, Alabama and a deacon in his Baptist church was beaten and shot by an Alabama State Trooper while taking part in a peaceful voting rights march in his city.  He was unarmed and died eight days later.  To defuse and refocus the black community’s outrage, James Bevel, who along with Amelia Boynton and others had organized the Selma project in 1963, announced a march of dramatic length, from Selma to Montgomery, the state capitol. 

The first march took place on March 7.  As marchers passed the midpoint of the bridge, where they left the city and crossed over into Dallas County jurisdiction, state troopers, local law enforcement, and local citizens described as “posse men” attacked the unarmed marchers with billy clubs and tear gas.  Law enforcement officials beat Amelia Boynton unconscious, and the media publicized a picture of her seen worldwide lying wounded on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  Also injured that day were current representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives John Lewis and Elijah Cummings.  The marchers were driven back into Selma.

The second march took place March 9th led by Rev. Martin Luther King.  The marchers were again confronted at the county line.  But when troopers stepped aside to let them pass, King led the marchers back to the church, obeying a federal injunction while seeking protection from the federal court for the march.  That night in Selma, a group of white men beat and murdered civil rights activist James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston, one of many white citizens, primarily from the North, who came to Selma to participate in the second march.  National outrage followed.

This is me writing off the top of my head here, not condensing history via Wikipedia.  What does it say about us a nation when we virtually ignore 4,000 lynchings of African Americans throughout the South for over 70 years and are suddenly incensed at the death of one white minister in Alabama?  Do you think the phrase “black lives matter” would have even been considered at that time?  I don’t.  I don’t think anyone even pretended that was true.

Martin Luther King and the protestors in Alabama demanded protection for the Selma marchers and a new federal voting rights law so that African Americans could register and vote everywhere in America without harassment.  President Johnson held an historic, nationally televised joint session of Congress on March 15 to ask for the bill’s introduction and passage.

Despite that pressure the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, refused to protect the marchers.  President Johnson put 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under federal command and they, along with FBI agents and Federal Marshalls, ensured the safety of the marchers.  With protection in place the march began in Selma.  They finally crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge and made their way to Montgomery on U.S. Route 80.  The marchers averaged ten miles a day, with black churches housing them and volunteers feeding them along the route.  By the time they reached Montgomery, on March 25^th, 25,000 people, white and black together, from the North, South, and across the country had entered the capitol in support of voting rights. 

One of the many to take part in that march was Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year old white civil rights activist, member of the NAACP and the Unitarian Universalist Church in Detroit, Michigan.  She had driven to Alabama after attending a protest at Wayne State University in Detroit on March 16^th where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for people of all faiths to come and help, saying the struggle “was everybody’s fight.”  She left her five young children in the care of her husband and her best friend, a black woman named Sarah Evans, with whom she shared similar views on the civil rights movement.

Once in Alabama she took part in the marches and after the last march ended put her Oldsmobile to use shuttling marchers from Montgomery back to Selma on the same U.S. Route 80 I had just travelled in the Buick.  She was assisted by Leroy Moton, a 19 year old African American.  Leroy was later to report that talking to Viola in the car that day was the first time he had ever had a conversation with a white woman.

While driving along U.S. Route 80 a car tried to force them off the road.  Viola continued.  After dropping passengers in Selma and heading back to Montgomery, she and Leroy stopped for gas at a local filling station near Lowndesboro (I’d gone through there in the Buick) and were subjected to abusive shouts and racist scorn.  Soon after, when Liuzzo stopped at a red light, four members of the local Ku Klux Klan pulled up alongside her.  Seeing a white woman with a black man in the car together they gave chase to the Oldsmobile. 

Viola tried to outrun them.  They overtook the Olds and shot directly through the driver’s side window at Liuzzo, fatally wounding her with two shots to the head.  She died in a ditch alongside the road.  Leroy Moton was not injured, but survived only by laying motionless, covered in Viola’s blood, when the Klansmen reached the car to check on their victims. 

Viola Liuzzo’s funeral, held on March 30^th in Detroit, was attended by prominent members of the civil rights movement as well as Teamster’s President Jimmy Hoffa and UAW president Walter Reuther. 

Less than two weeks after Viola’s death charred crosses were found in front of four Detroit homes.  One was the Liuzzo residence.  In the aftermath of the tragedy that befell the Liuzzo family, her friend Sarah Evans went on to become the permanent caretaker of Viola’s five young children.

The federal Voting Rights Act became law on August 6, 1965.

I cruised the streets of Selma in the Buick.  It’s a depressed town.  There’s a nice historic district, which reminded me of the formerly glorious homes in Cairo, Illinois, and Live Oak cemetery where Edmund Pettus is buried.  The civil rights museums were inexplicably closed.  I had planned to spend the night in Selma but lost my enthusiasm. 

My trip had not gone as planned.  Instead of talking to southerners of today I became lost in my own head imagining the southerners, particularly the white ones, of yesterday.  I didn’t like what I was thinking.  When faced with doubts, I always say, turn to comfort food. 

I pulled the Buick into a shabby looking Sonic, got out of the Buick to stretch my legs, and spread my atlas out on a picnic table.  There was a clunky steel box hanging by the table.  I pushed a button.  A disembodied voice came out of a speaker.

“Welcome to Sonic, what can I bring you?”

“I’ll have a hot dog and a big water with ice please.”

“What do you want on your dawg?”

“Everything but ketchup, extra hot peppers, plenty of onions, and celery salt.”

I didn’t know if they were familiar with Chicago dogs in Selma but something close to that was what I was after. 

The sun was hanging well above the horizon and it was warm, even though it was late February.  I wondered if it was hot for those marchers in 1965.  I had to quit thinking about it.  I focused instead on roads.  Just how far is it to Pensacola I wondered.

The hot dog came, and it was disappointing.  It wasn’t very hot.  The bun, although it was poppy seed, was stale.  It had all the right condiments for a Chicago dog: the sport peppers, the tomatoes slices cut in half moons, the dyed green relish, nicely chopped fresh onions and yellow mustard.  But when you put all that on top of a barely warm wiener in a dried-out bun, you ruin the experience.  I managed to choke it down though.  I hadn’t eaten since the motel breakfast.

Google maps told me it was 3 hours and 11 minutes to Pensacola if I stayed off I 65 and used two lane roads.  Sounded good to me.  I had a sudden urge to leave Alabama.  While I had gained only a passers-by knowledge of the state and its people in 2019, I’d learned way too much about its past.  I started thinking about crossing into Florida.  I paid my bill, the only civil rights tourism dollars I contributed to Selma, left the waitress a good tip (bad food is never their fault, it’s the cooks) and steered the Buick back onto the road.