March 13, 2015 at 5:21 p.m.
Milestone must be remembered
Editorial
If you haven’t been thinking about Selma this week, you should have been.
Selma, Alabama, a sleepy city of about 20,000 seems an odd place to find its way into American history.
But it has, just as surely as Concord and Lexington, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor or Iwo Jima did when they became indelible milestones.
Those of us of a certain age remember Selma mostly from the black and white images broadcast over network television news 50 years ago. We remember seeing peaceful, non-violent marchers in search of voting rights beaten with enthusiastic cruelty.
We remember watching “Bull” Conner, George Wallace and others blame the troubles that wracked the American South in the 1960s on “outside agitators,” while refusing to acknowledge the sour and sinful infrastructure of white supremacy that allowed a privileged minority to prevent voters of another race from coming to the polls.
We remember reading with horror about the deaths of civil rights workers who gave offense by sharing a ride in a car or sharing a soft drink with a person of another race.
And yet, it is so easy to forget. And it’s even easier to revise memory to make it more palatable. But doing so would be a terrible mistake.
There was absolutely nothing about Selma that was palatable. The events arrived with the taste of national shame, and all of the efforts to cast the blame on “outside agitators” just made the whole thing that much more distasteful.
At the time — and those of us of a certain age remember this clearly — there was an unshakeable feeling that some of the residents of the United States understood what it meant to be an American and some of them did not.
It’s not that those folks weren’t patriotic. In their own way, they were.
But their loyalty was to a mythical memory. It bore little connection to the real challenges facing the country, and it failed to dedicate itself to making this country better.
And, when all is said and done, making this country better is what the Selma milestone is all about. Remember it. —J.R.
Selma, Alabama, a sleepy city of about 20,000 seems an odd place to find its way into American history.
But it has, just as surely as Concord and Lexington, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor or Iwo Jima did when they became indelible milestones.
Those of us of a certain age remember Selma mostly from the black and white images broadcast over network television news 50 years ago. We remember seeing peaceful, non-violent marchers in search of voting rights beaten with enthusiastic cruelty.
We remember watching “Bull” Conner, George Wallace and others blame the troubles that wracked the American South in the 1960s on “outside agitators,” while refusing to acknowledge the sour and sinful infrastructure of white supremacy that allowed a privileged minority to prevent voters of another race from coming to the polls.
We remember reading with horror about the deaths of civil rights workers who gave offense by sharing a ride in a car or sharing a soft drink with a person of another race.
And yet, it is so easy to forget. And it’s even easier to revise memory to make it more palatable. But doing so would be a terrible mistake.
There was absolutely nothing about Selma that was palatable. The events arrived with the taste of national shame, and all of the efforts to cast the blame on “outside agitators” just made the whole thing that much more distasteful.
At the time — and those of us of a certain age remember this clearly — there was an unshakeable feeling that some of the residents of the United States understood what it meant to be an American and some of them did not.
It’s not that those folks weren’t patriotic. In their own way, they were.
But their loyalty was to a mythical memory. It bore little connection to the real challenges facing the country, and it failed to dedicate itself to making this country better.
And, when all is said and done, making this country better is what the Selma milestone is all about. Remember it. —J.R.
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