Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the first Selma to Montgomery march, and thousands of people are expected to descend on the small town located on the banks of the Alabama River to mark one of the most powerful moments of the Civil Rights movement.
President Barack Obama and dignitaries from throughout the country will be on hand to mark the occasion, along with some of the surviving members of that initial march, which became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Among that latter group will be John Lewis, today a U.S. Representative from Georgia, but then a 24-year-old Civil Rights activist who was among those who were beaten with billy-clubs and attacked with tear gas by law enforcement as the roughly 600 marchers crested the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
To call the march a Selma-to-Montgomery march is a bit of a misnomer; marchers were turned back just six blocks beyond the Selma town limits.
Yet while the march may not have been completed that day, in many respects its purpose was. Television news crews captured the brutal assault on the peaceful marchers and the powerful images transmitted into American homes throughout the country proved to be a galvanizing moment in the Civil Rights struggle.
The march came after more than a year of civil rights activism in Selma, a town where half of its population was black, yet only 1 percent of blacks were registered voters. The Jim Crow-dominated South had successfully employed many tactics that suppressed black voter registration, including literacy tests that were impossibly difficult to pass, economic intimidation (blacks were attempted to register to vote were subject to being fired by their white employers) and, as “Bloody Sunday” so powerfully illustrated, even violence.
March 7, 1965, was certainly not the only time when blacks were brutally confronted in their efforts to claim their rights as Americans; it was just the most visible. It mattered, too. Five months later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, opening the door to the voting booth to tens of thousands of previously disenfranchised citizens.
Now, 50 years later, our attention will return again to the town of Selma and the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge.
It will be a day of celebration, certainly, but it should also be a day of introspection for all Americans, especially black Americans.
No doubt, we will again marvel at the sacrifices of those who risked life and limb for the right to vote and it is proper that we pause to recognize this great moment in our history.
But the real test of our sincerity won’t come Saturday. It will come May 12 when voters go to the polls to choose a U.S. representative for our district. And it will come again this fall, when we go to the polls to determine many local and state-wide races.
If we truly honor those who marched in Selma 50 years ago and the scores of others who made similar yet less well-known sacrifices, we have not only an opportunity to say it, but to demonstrate it.
We have done a pretty lousy job of the latter, unfortunately. Only in presidential elections does a majority of registered voters go to the polls. State elections draw fewer voters and local elections fewer still. In the last Columbus municipal election in 2013, just one in five registered voters cared enough to vote.
Those numbers prompt an uncomfortable question: Fifty years later, does Selma still matter?
We won’t have that answer Saturday as we watch the 50th anniversary coverage on TV. The answer will come first on May 12 and in every election that follows.
It is then we will know if we have proven to be worthy of the sacrifices we celebrate Saturday.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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