From Selma, Alabama to Montgomery
Political activism in this country now lacks the religio-spiritus component that made the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s finally successful. Now no one's willing to die, an activist is only for or against something in varying degrees of intensity, there's no God dynamic. What God dynamic there is has shifted to The Right. The Right now owns the word, freedom.
Freedom. The word freedom has more or less been sold as a feeling, and not the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness promised in The Declaration of Independence. The word "sold" is the best I can think of to portray the propaganda techniques The Right has successfully employed, beginning in the late 1950s/early60s AFTER the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, in response to that movement's social and political gains. The Right now owns the word, "freedom" and they've programatically sold the word to their adherents, such as they are, overwhelmingly caucasian, undereducated, suspicious with good reason of social institution. The Right's concept of freedom is based upon an almost total distrust of federal government, a distrust not dissimilar from the distrust made manifest in the break from the Union the Confederate States made official on February 4, 1861.
The first White House of The Confederacy, the Executive Residence of President Jefferson Davis and his family, is in Montgomery, Alabama. I visited yesterday, after having driven the 54 miles from Selma.
Selma is a magical place, as magical as Chartres or Stonehedge or other magical places I've visited. I met a mother and daughter there, Rosemary (70) and Carlette (38). They'd cruised by me while I walking around downtown taking pictures, mistaking me for someone else. We talked for awhile. Both went to Selma High School: Rosemary when it was segregated and Carlette when it was integrated. They also told me where to get good bar-b-que.
Downtown isn't a pretty picture--many of the buildings are vacant, windows are broken, weeds in the sidewalks--though you can almost imagine how beautiful it once was, and prosperous, and could be again, maybe, though it's beautiful also the way it is. At 7 p.m. when the light's right downtown Selma is a photographers paradise. Everything bad and good about the country comes out then--slavery, white supremacy, gospel music and blues, the human civil rights movement--you can feel it all while walking around Selma on a late summer evening.
I camped at the Selma Flea Market and RV Park outside of town. It was all white, mostly workers at The International Paper (IP) plant. I talked with a fork-lift operator who worked at IP, making an hourly wage, a witty guy who lived in Louisiana. "It's hot here but it's only heat, where I live it's hot and wet." The park was more or less a gypsy camp, with workers living in their RV's and trailers: there were kids running around, kicking soccerballs thrown the mown crabgrass, playing with toys, riding bikes, being kids. How'd this work, I wondered? Did the kids go to school? And if they did, were they resented as outsiders?
Selma's one of several ground zeros of the Civil Rights Movement. On March 7, 1965 about 500 marchers left Selma for Montgomery on US Highway 80. At the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge they were met by county sheriff's and state troopers who attacked them with tear gas and billy clubs. The incident became known as "Bloody Sunday." MLK Jr. rushed to Selma, met with other activists at the Brown Chapel A.M.E Church. They made a plan there, non-violent but definite. By the time they crossed the bridge--Edmund Pettus, by the way, was a Confederate General--there were 25,000 marchers. The force of the publicity caused LB Johnson, not such a bad man as I'd previously thought him to be, to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that gave ALL CITIZENS THE RIGHT TO VOTE.
Sunday morning I attended church at the Brown Chapel. Pastor Leodis Strong put forth a rousing sermon, "Do the Right Thing," invoking the Spike Lee film and reading from The Bible (Kings) the story of Elijah's struggle with Baal worship, and Jezebel's chicanery. "Pray for Donald Trump," Pastor Strong said more than once, "Pray for Franklin Graham", son of Rev. Billy Graham, adviser to the current President as his father was adviser to Richard Nixon, most notably, and harsh critic of Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. DO THE RIGHT THING, DO THE RIGHT THING, DO THE RIGHT THING, Pastor Strong said over and over, to which we all must say, AMEN.
Freedom's a large thing to think about. On the drive from Selma to Montgomery I try to begin to define it for myself: Freedom is freedom from hatred, freedom from vicitimization, freedom from the sort of materialism that insists on having more than it needs.