Let's take one more look at the recent 50th year commemoration of the march across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., with a focus on one Civil Rights Movement veteran still active today and another, now-deceased veteran, both of whom wondered whether America will always be "racially insane."
(Macye Chatman above)
SELMA, Ala. - Macye
Chatman was a wide-eyed, Tennessee-bred, 19-year-old Tuskegee student in 1965 who turned civil rights activist
after seeing the level of racism and segregation practiced in the Deep South.
“If you rode the bus
back then, you’d have to go to back of the bus. My roommates from Mississippi
told me you couldn’t even go in some stores and buy clothes. Clothes! You
wouldn’t be riding with white people in the car. They would be following you,
and you might be killed.”
Forget about casting a ballot to change things. “I felt it
was wrong that black people couldn’t vote.”
So Chatman joined the movement in Montgomery, stood with
Martin Luther Jr., and demonstrated at the state Capitol at the same time the
historic Selma-to-Montgomery march was getting underway 50 years ago.
She spent her 20th birthday in jail. “I got
arrested in front of the state Capitol. They didn’t want me there. We were
staying, and we locked arms and sat down in an Indian-style protest. State
troopers were all around us. The horses were circling. We stayed two-and-a-half
days in jail, 12 to 20 in a cell. You slept on the floor. I never was charged
with anything.”
When she got out, she knew that thousands of marchers were
making their way toward Montgomery from Selma, and she was going to be there to
meet them.
Chatman, now 70 and living in Jackson, Tenn., was one of
tens of thousands who came back to Selma this month to commemorate the
Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 that led to the historic Voting Rights Act
of that year, including “Bloody Sunday” on March 7, 1965, when state troopers
and local law enforcement authorities brutally beat and tear-gassed 600
peaceful protesters on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
President Obama and Georgia Congressman and “Bloody Sunday”
veteran John Lewis were among those who came to the event, and many who were
there pointed to the backtracking on voting rights, the economic inequality,
and continuing racist behavior by too many uniformed police that exist across
the nation today.
“Today we are right back to where we were in 1965,” Chatman
says. “We are making so many steps backward. They’re trying to repeal the
Voting Rights Act. They’re trying to repeal women’s rights, the right to
protect her body. What about racial profiling?”
Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County vs.
Holder decision essentially lifted federal pre-approval requirements for voting
changes in places where blacks historically faced discrimination. Dozens of
states, including Mississippi, where I live, have responded by implementing new
restrictions on voting.
Modern-day Republicans, the spawn of erstwhile
arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond’s 1964 campaign to change the one-party
Democratic South to a one-party Republican South, pushed through those
restrictions, tough new laws on voter ID and when and where people can vote.
The target: Democrat-voting minorities.
The ruse Republicans use to defend voter restrictions is the
claim of voter fraud. Yet little evidence exists of voter fraud on the part of
voters themselves. “Where there has been election fraud in American elections,
it is usually committed by politicians,” says Lorraine C. Minnite, director of
urban studies at Rutgers University. “The most important illustration of
outright corruption of elections is the century-long success of white
supremacists in the American South stripping African-Americans of their right
to vote.”
I traveled to Selma, Ala., during a South-wide journey in
1992 to report on the role of the black voter in elections that year. Selma’s late
civil rights activist and attorney J. L. Chestnut Jr., a much-revered veteran
of “Bloody Sunday”, talked to me at length about race in America.
“There is no way to escape white racism in America. America
is racially insane. It affects politics and everything else. I can’t spend a
lot of time worrying about how far we’ve come. I got to worry about how far we
got to go. We’ve come a long way and probably got twice (as far) to go.”
Chestnut talked about “Bloody Sunday” on Edmund Pettus
Bridge, a bridge named after a Confederate general and alleged Klu Klux Klan
leader.
“I remember March 7, 1965, here in Selma when we came face
to face on Edmund Pettus Bridge with the awesome might of the Alabama
government. I remember John Lewis bleeding like a stuck hog.”
Yet Chestnut came out of that experience with hope. “I
remember whites coming to Selma and risking their lives. A nation that will do
that is not all bad. … I tell white Americans that I have more faith in America
than they do. I believe if you give Americans the truth, they will do their
damndest to be fair.”
Still, giving Americans the truth is a tall order, Chestnut
admitted, when the goal of so many politicians is just the opposite.
A version of this column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press of Jackson, Miss.
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