Contradictions and questions arise as nation marks ‘Bloody Sunday’

9th March 2015   ·   0 Comments

When the nation’s first Black president stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge to honor the marchers beaten there 50 years ago, he’ was standing on a structure that’s at once synonymous with the civil rights struggle and a tribute to a reputed Ku Klux Klan leader, The Associated Press reported last week.

The latter fact had all but faded from local memory until recently, when a Selma student group launched an online petition to rename the landmark bridge.

During his 50th anniversary address Saturday, President Barack Obama was flanked on one side by a new historic marker commemorating “Bloody Sunday,” when white police beat demonstrators marching for Black voting rights on March 7, 1965. The sign, erected earlier this year by the state tourism department, notes Obama’s 2007 appearance there just before his election and the accolades for Selma, the recent film about the march.

It offers no details about Edmund Winston Pettus, a Confederate general and U.S. senator who lived in Selma after the Civil War. The Encyclopedia of Alabama, an online database sponsored by the University of Alabama, Auburn University and the Alabama Department of Education, says Pettus held the title of grand dragon of the Alabama Klan in 1877 — an assertion that’s questioned by some historians.

Just beyond the other end of the bridge, a billboard erected recently bears a heroic image of another Confederate general, Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. The ad, sponsored by a group dedicated to honoring Forrest, invites visitors to see Selma’s “War Between the States” historic sites; next month is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Selma, in which Forrest fought.

The online student petition, addressed to Selma Mayor George Patrick Evans and to the National Parks Service, has been up for more than two weeks. It does not propose a new name for the bridge.

John Gainey, executive director of Students UNITE, a racially integrated youth group that began the petition, told The Associated Press that having a white supremacist’s name attached to the city’s most visible landmark illustrates the city’s deep racial divisions a half-century after the marchers were beaten at the bridge.

Just as in the 1960s, Gainey said, Selma is split by race. Blacks attend public schools, most whites go to private academies and many Blacks still live in run-down shanties while whites occupy nice homes with manicured lawns, he said. Yet the town of nearly 20,000 people is about 80 percent Black.

“We think it really does represent something larger,” said Gainey.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a veteran civil rights leader, agrees the bridge’s name should be changed to quit honoring someone with alleged Klan ties.

“They’re responsible for too much death and misery. We don’t need to honor them,” Lowery, a lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr. who participated in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, told The Associated Press “I’m with the kids. Let’s change it.”

However, Selma historian Alston Fitts doubts Pettus had anything to do with the KKK. Although the city was a hub of racial animus in the 1960s, Selma was known as a “safe place” for Blacks aligned with liberal Republicans after the Civil War during Reconstruction partly because of a lack of Klan activity, he said.

“He was a pretty lousy Klan leader if that’s what he was,” said Fitts told The Associated Press

An attorney who entered the Confederate army as a major in 1861 and rose to the rank of brigadier general by 1863, Pettus was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1897 after Reconstruction and served until his death in 1907 at age 86.

Pettus’ views on race were widely known during Reconstruction. In July 1871, when Pettus testified before a congressional committee investigating the Klan, he made it clear he believed whites, not Blacks, were the victims in the post-Civil War South.

Pettus asserted that any campaign of intimidation was being waged by Republicans and “carpet-baggers” seeking to incite Blacks to commit “acts of aggression on their part against the white people,” according to congressional archives.

As tens of thousands of people flocked to Selma for the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” some Black conservatives used the occasion to question the goals and motives of the civil rights community today.

“Fifty years ago, this nation’s Civil Rights Movement staged three marches for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. They resulted in the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. Racism, violence and discrimination were omnipresent in the lives of all too many Black Americans—something that hardly required the flights of fantasies or fertile imaginations driving today’s protests and marches,” said Project 21 member Joe R. Hicks, a former executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles. “In contrast to the those who marched at Selma for realistic goals and objectives back then, those claiming to be today’s civil rights leaders make handsome livings from specious claims that America still has ‘so much farther to go’ in the struggle against racism. Unlike Dr. King and other civil rights greats, this new leadership spends most of its time looking in the historical rear-view mirror. It’s something that blinds them, perhaps opportunistically, to the amazing pace of progress that’s occurred since the awful violence of ‘Bloody Sunday.’ Mired in racial mythology, these leaders and activists insultingly argue Black lives don’t matter in today’s society and that racist cops have declared open season on Black youth. Drawn to the glow of TV cameras and political grandstanding, this bankrupt leadership turns away from the hard work of redeeming communities in preference to the cheap and easy lobbing of empty charges against white America. Yet the fact is, 50 years after Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery, and after the civil rights victories of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, a once-oppressed people can hardly be described in that manner.”

The “Bloody Sunday” 50th anniversary commemoration came just days after the U.S. Department of Justice announced it will not file civil rights chargers against Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson who killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. last August. the Brown family an­nounced Thursday it will in fact file lawsuits in Michael Brown’s death.

The “Bloody Sunday” commemoration was expected to attract seasoned civil rights leaders as well as younger participants who have led national protests last fall in the wake of grand jury decisions in St. Louis and NYC that decided not to indict officers involved in the deaths of two unarmed Black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

This article originally published in the March 9, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.