Few countries buffet and shine their historical landmarks and dates with the pride and precision of the United States. The artefacts and documents and battle sites of the civil war are so meticulously preserved that visitors can’t help but wonder if the participants did not have half an eye on history even as they tried to obliterate the other side.
This weekend marks a return to one of enduring touchstones of the civil rights movement. It is the 60th anniversary of Selma. A march across the town’s chunky metal bridge will take place tomorrow to mark the events of Alabama’s Bloody Sunday. The remaining participants in the 1965 struggle will return, along with several prominent members of Congress and other guests. The sign as you enter the city says it all: Est 1820. Welcome to historic Selma. Queen City of the Blackbelt.
But its sacred place in modern US history has not been able to stall the town’s rapid decline.
Selma continues to hold the unwanted first place in Alabama’s list of fastest shrinking cities. It has lost 20 per cent of its population since 2010 and its 16,000 residents are struggling to find ways to reverse the fall.
The closure of the nearby Craig air force base, in 1977, is often cited as the turning point. The reopening four years ago of the St James Hotel, an intact waterfront hotel built in 1837, offered a glimpse of Selma’s potential as a historical tourist beacon. But many of the once-thriving waterfront stores have been abandoned.
Ironically, Selma was thriving economically when it acquired global fame. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had done little to encourage the black community to register to vote. The Dallas County Voters League organised talks and protests, which led to the shooting dead of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a 25-year-old Baptist church deacon in Marion, by a state trooper. In response, the idea of a mass march from Selma to Alabama, the state capital, was conceived.
State troopers and “possemen” with batons and tear gas charged about 600 marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Amelia Boynton, one of the organisers, was beaten unconscious and a photograph of a state trooper standing over her as she lay on a grass verge would soon appear on news pages around the world.
Two days later, James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who arrived in Selma after the attacks to support the protest, was severely beaten after leaving an integrated restaurant on the evening of March 9th. He died from his injuries in a hospital in Birmingham two nights later.
In Washington, president Johnson referenced the minister when he delivered his American Promise speech to congress on March 15th, at once fiery and mournful. The language was of its time but the sentiment, from a white Texan president, was sensational.
“Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome. As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I know how agonising racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has passed, more than a hundred years, since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully free tonight. It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great president of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact.”
The slow walk from Selma was officially completed on March 24th, 1965, by thousands who covered 10 miles a day along Route 80 before gathering at the state capitol. Fifty years later, president Barack Obama held the hand of the wheelchair-bound Boynton as they led a ceremonial walk across the bridge.
The emotions and characteristics of that extraordinary month – the dignity and the courage and the relentless insistence that enough was enough – had, by the 50th anniversary, been elevated into the realms of American sacred history. The bridge – never the prettiest piece of architecture – stood now as a symbol of the aching, endless struggle of the black American community for equality.
A major film, Selma, released just ahead of the 50th anniversary, with David Oyelowo, Oprah Winfrey, Tim Roth and Tom Wilkinson caused heated debate over its portrayal of LBJ’s role in that period.
Hopes that the film would revive Selma’s economic fortunes never fully materialised. For all its geographical beauty and history, Selma is too far removed from the Alabama interstates to prosper in the 21st century.
Now, this year’s anniversary march takes place against the ominous backdrop of the gleeful assault on diversity, equity and inclusion by President Trump’s administration. It coincides with a period in which the US has become almost perfectly split down the middle on either side of Trump’s political manifesto. But the public seems simply too disheartened or fatigued to engage in the mass protests. The spirit of Selma is weak, at least for now.
And the irony of the fact that Selma’s busiest weekend of the year is to mark those turbulent few days six decades ago will be lost on nobody. For Selma, each year brings a renewed struggle.
