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Bloody Sunday at Pettus Bridge
By Amin Sharif
They say
beneath Pettus Bridge
that every wild flower
spread out its petals
to catch the blood
drops . . .
and the muddy Alabama River
wept and moaned
like a woman who had lost her
lover.
They say
birds rose up
and danced in the Alabama sky
like testifying women in
church
and the earth cried out
like an old nigger preacher
saying:
See Lord! See what they doing
to your children, Lord!
But on Pettus Bridge
the only thing heard
was the slap of billy clubs
the snap of broken bones
and screams
the whispers
of demons at work . . .
on Bloody Sunday! |
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John
Lewis, SNCC Chairman |
7 March 1965
By March 1965, the
Dallas County Voters League, the Southern Christian Leadership
Council (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) were all working for voting rights in Alabama.
On March
7,
John Lewis, head of SNCC, and fellow activist
Hosea Williams led a group of silent marchers from the Brown
Chapel AME Church to the foot of the Pettus Bridge. The
subsequent police riot became known as "Bloody
Sunday."
When ABC television
interrupted a Nazi war crimes documentary, Judgment in Nuremberg, to
show footage of violence in Selma a powerful metaphor was
presented to the nation. Within forty-eight hours,
demonstrations in support of the marchers were held in eighty
cities and thousands of religious and lay leaders, including Dr.
Martin Luther King, flew to
Selma.
On March 9, Dr.
King led a group again to the Pettus Bridge where they knelt,
prayed, and, to the consternation of some, returned to Brown
Chapel. That night a Northern minister, who was in Selma to
march, was killed by white vigilantes.
Outraged citizens
continued to inundate the White House and the Congress with
letters and phone calls. On March 9, for example, Jackie
Robinson, the baseball hero, sent a telegram to the President:
IMPORTANT YOU TAKE
IMMEDIATE ACTION IN ALABAMA ONE MORE DAY OF SAVAGE TREATMENT BY
LEGALIZED HATCHET MEN COULD LEAD TO OPEN WARFARE BY AROUSED
NEGROES AMERICA CANNOT AFFORD THIS IN 1965
In Montgomery,
Federal Judge Frank Johnson, Jr. temporarily restrained all
parties in order to review the case. And, President Lyndon
Johnson addressed the American people before a televised Joint
Session of Congress, saying, "There is no issue of States
rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human
rights . . . We have already waited a hundred years and more,
and the time for waiting is gone . . ."
Allowing CBS
footage of "Bloody Sunday" as evidence in court, Judge
Johnson ruled on March 17, that the demonstrators be permitted
to march. Under protection of a federalized National Guard,
voting rights advocates left Selma on March 21 and stood 25,000
strong on March 25 before the state capitol in Montgomery.
As a direct
consequence of these events, the U.S. Congress passed the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, guaranteeing every American twenty-one and
over the right to register to vote. During the next four years
the number of U.S. blacks eligible to vote rose from 23 to 61
percent.
John Lewis, nearly
beaten to death at the bridge, went on to serve as Director of
the Voter Education Project, a program which eventually added
nearly four million minorities to the voter rolls.
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The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights
Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous scholarship,
historian Lewis (Gonna
Sit at the Welcome Table) revisits the
ragtag band of young men and women who formed the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Impatient
with what they considered the overly cautious and
accommodating pace of the NAACP and
Martin Luther King
Jr., the black college students and their white
allies, inspired by Gandhi's principles of
nonviolence and moral integrity, risked their lives
to challenge a deeply entrenched system. Fanning out
over the Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins,
voter registration drives, Freedom Schools and
protest marches. Despite early successes, the
movement disintegrated in the late 1960s, succeeded
by the militant Black Power movement. The highly
readable history follows the later careers of the
principal leaders. Some, like
Stokely
Carmichael and H.
Rap Brown, became bitter and disillusioned.
Others, including
Marion Barry,
Julian Bond and
John
Lewis, tempered their idealism and moved from
protest to politics, assuming positions of
leadership within the very institutions they had
challenged. According to the author, No organization
contributed more to the civil rights movement than
SNCC, and with his eloquent book, he offers a
deserved tribute.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
/
Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By
Michelle
Alexander
The
mass incarceration of people of color through the War on
Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child
born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The absence of
black fathers from families across America is not simply
a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time
watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black
men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away
for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed
by whites. Most people seem to
imagine that the drug war—which has swept millions of
poor people of color behind bars—has been aimed at
rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This war has
been focused overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses,
like marijuana possession—the very crimes that happen
with equal frequency in middle class white communities.
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update 5 July 2008
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