On Thursday — the 40th anniversary of Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act — things were fairly quiet on either side of the bridge spanning the Alabama River. There were no marchers gathered willing to risk life and limb just to end segregation.There were no brutal bigots wearing badges waiting to bust the heads of folks marching for equal rights, as had been the case in March of 1965. Images from Bloody Sunday jolted a nation into action, producing in less than five months a law to ensure all Americans could exercise their vote.
Last week, there was nothing more than folks going about their business on a typical hot August day in Alabama — and that’s part of the problem, and why the struggle for Civil Rights continues.
As many speakers at Selma’s Concordia College noted last week during a conference sponsored by the Democracy Project, progress has indeed been made since those dark days when a violent form of terrorism visited Alabama, Mississippi and the rest of the South. Don’t be thrown by the term “terrorists,” for that is precisely the description for those misguided souls who attempted to intimidate black folks from exercising their full constitutional rights.
A significant battle in this war against terrorists was passage of the Voting Rights Act, which was signed by President Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965. As Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham, noted, it put into the law books that which had been promised 99 years earlier with the passage of the 15th Amendment, a law that declared voting could not be denied on the basis or race or national origin.
The old methods of limiting the democratic process were to go away. No longer could the white power structure cut out entire segments of the population.
All this was the reason for coming to Selma, which is described accurately by Lawrence Wofford, president of the Democracy Project and planner of last week’s Celebrating Alabama’s Gift to The World conference, as a spot on the map of freedom’s struggle as significant as Tiananmen Square or the former Berlin Wall.
We must remember. Sadly, too few were on hand Thursday to recall the struggles of the past and the blood that was shed to breathe life into democracy.
Had I seen the ghosts of Jim Crow Alabama wandering around the bridge made famous on Bloody Sunday, what would they have said? I wonder if they might be heartened by the complacency in vogue today, by the sparse turnout at the Selma conference.
Well hell, they would muse, why did folks fight so hard for the right to vote, only to have their kids and grandkids not even bother to show up on Election Day?
The racist poltergeists would recognize a cleaned-up version of their old tactics. Nobody much bothers with firehoses, bullhorns and police dogs these days. Why should they? All that’s needed are words. Code words that scare voters into casting ballots. Blather about economic prosperity that flatly contradicts religious ethics demanding care for the poor and the sick.
Keep ’em distracted and downcast, our ghosts would intone, and you never need to get rough.
Before the ink was dry on the Voting Rights Act, a new strategy was building. Gone were the old ways of keeping black folks down and sensible white folks mostly silent. The “Whites Only” signs were replaced by an attitude of resentment. Politicians were happy to egg on whites who were convinced these new voters were getting something for nothing. “Welfare queens,” code for black mothers, were gaming the system. “Quota systems” and “affirmative action” were taking away jobs from deserving whites.
The Republican Party’s Southern strategy changed the electoral landscape by catering to the resentment and fear felt by many whites. Only this summer, before a meeting of the NAACP, did current GOP head Ken Mehlman confess to this sin. “We were wrong,” he said, “for trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.”
Speaking before the crowd Thursday, Congressman Davis illustrated how the tactics have changed — but the game hasn’t. During a supposedly non-controversial vote recently to ban China from acquiring U.S. weapons, an amazing thing happened, Davis said. The vote was heading to sure confirmation. Who would vote to arm an emerging world power that has threatened its neighbors? Suddenly, during the vote, a large defense contractor called House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and told the Texas congressman to hold up. The company’s representatives said the measure might inadvertently be bad for their business. With that call, 145 representatives changed their vote and killed the weapons ban.
Could the same thing happen, Davis wondered, if advocates for the poor were to place a call to Congress? Would the concerns of common folk get 145 congressmen to change their vote on a dime?
Not likely, as Christian writer Bill McKibben points out in the most recent issue of Harper’s Magazine. “America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior,” McKibben writes. He’s thinking of tenets of Christianity such of caring for the poor, loving one’s neighbor and looking beyond personal, selfish desires. All of the above get only lip service, while the riches keep flowing to the wealthiest Americans.
So while you won’t find politicians walking around bragging about disenfranchising classes of citizens, you will find them espousing policies that do just that for the least among us.
You will find them playing on new fears to divide blacks and whites and now browns.
You will find them pitting faiths against one another, while ignoring the very things that matter — social justice, human rights, properly funded education and social services.
Alabama is the incubator for this sort of politics of resentment and neglect. The forces out to protect the status quo (and thus their own humongous economic fortune and political power) love to do the sidestep when it comes to positive change. Talk about bringing fairness to our tax structure or rewriting the racist 1901 Constitution, and these special interests wave the bloody shirt of rhetoric quicker than the Christian Coalition can take a donation from an Indian casino.
These special interests love the arguments about “liberal taxes” and Ten Commandments monuments. The ones about gay marriage — hardly a top priority in such a devout state — and official state whiskey. It keeps the spotlight off them and their benign neglect and most uncharitable deeds.
In the fall of 2004, the state went to the voters looking to erase segregationist language pertaining to schools from the Constitution. Using false scare tactics, these enemies of change frightened just enough voters to make the measure fail.
One candidate for statewide office made the biggest stink about defeating what was known as Amendment 2. Tom Parker, a key ally of Roy Moore in his Ten Commandments fight, spread disinformation about the amendment, claiming it would raise taxes when experts from the governor on down assured voters it would do no such thing. Parker, who won a seat on the state Supreme Court, had no qualms about stuffing a Confederate flag in his coat pocket and posing for a photo during the campaign. Say what you will about that flag, you would think that a man seeking to be a judge of all the people in the highest court in the state would recognize that the symbol he so casually donned was used to intimidate people of color only a few decades back. It was the very symbol worn on the uniforms of George Wallace’s State Troopers when they trampled Civil Rights marchers on the Pettus Bridge in 1965.
William Winter, the governor of Mississippi from 1980 to 1984, spoke Thursday. He told of teaching students at a predominantly black college in Mississippi’s Delta. Those youngsters, Winter says, know barely a thing about their own bloody history. Practically none knew the story of Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Civil Rights worker gunned down in front of his own home.
No wonder the vote is taken lightly; the next generations don’t know the blood that was shed just to gain it.
Rep. Davis, echoing Dr. Martin Luther King’s reminder about the arc bending toward justice, said last week, “Progress always keeps winning out.” He’s right, but it does it at an agonizingly slow pace.
But if he’s also correct that “we have to weep to achieve clarity,” then we are surely due an ample share of clear-thinking any minute now.
What did I find on the other side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge? Sadly, not much hope, and not much resolve to carry on among the inheritors of the Civil Rights struggle. Regaining both is the mission for all committed to spreading justice and freedom.
