Kamala Harris travelled to historic Selma, Ala., to opine about the Mideast, while the town languishes in poverty
There’s a spot in Selma, Ala., where politicians go when they want to deliver what they hope will be an attention-grabbing statement.
It’s at the bottom of the town’s shabby main street, in a little parkette off to one side. The speaker stands with his or her back to the river, ensuring photographs catch the rusty framework of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the background.
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On March 3, it was U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris who stood at the foot of the bridge, its two steel arches curving away across the Alabama River behind her. Her message was about Israel, but it’s the date that was key, March 7 being the 59th anniversary of a savage day that changed the United States forever.
A bit of history might be required here, but don’t go away. Selma was a crucial site in the long, bloody fight for civil rights among Black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge was the scene of some of the most critical moments in that struggle.
It was there in March 1965 that 600 marchers set off on a trek to the state capital to protest the segregationist policies still in place a century after the Civil War. The moment they crossed the bridge, they were met by a wall of police, who waded into the peaceful crowd with clubs, whips and truncheons, some wrapped in barbed wire, cracking skulls and breaking bones in full expectation they could get away with an open display of racist brutality, just as they had so often in the past.
This time, however, the clash was caught by news cameras and played across the country to shocked viewers, causing the same sort of belated outrage that met the murder of George Floyd 55 years later. The White House quickly introduced and won passage of the Voting Rights Act, which helped produce a steady increase in Black elected officials and a ongoing, if slow, erosion of white supremacist powers across the south.
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That’s the end of the history lesson. Today, Selma could really use some help. For years it’s been the fastest-shrinking city in the state, the population of barely 16,000 down about 20 per cent since 2010, and almost 10 per cent in just the past four years. The main street is a shabby procession of dusty-looking low-rise buildings and boarded-up windows. The nearest signs of life are miles away on the state road at the edge of town, where the fast-food joints and chain hotels are located.
Celebrity politicians show up on the anniversary to stand by the bridge, deliver their remarks and beat it out of town. President Joe Biden was there last year, blasting Republican states for passing “dozens of anti-voting laws fuelled by the big lie.” Former president Barack Obama walked across the bridge to mark the 50th anniversary in 2015 (you can watch it on YouTube). A year earlier, Oprah Winfrey joined a cast of dozens of Hollywood stars for the shooting of “Selma,” a film based on events surrounding the famous march.
Other than a few glitzy film clips, there’s not much evidence of the town benefiting from its brief annual show of attention. Buses appear occasionally to unload curious tourists long enough to stroll across the bridge, grab a photo and climb back aboard. They might stick around longer if there was more to see, but while the town boasts a deep history, little has been done to benefit from it.
The historic church where Martin Luther King appeared, and from which the marches originated, has been closed for extensive repairs and was listed as one of America’s most endangered historic places in 2022. An interpretive centre run by the parks department has a single small showroom featuring a few exhibits, some photographs and a sprinkling of artifacts.
A few blocks away, a testament to the racial hatred that pervaded so much of its past sits in a moss-hung graveyard heavily sprinkled with Confederate flags and a monument to the Civil War cavalry raider Nathan Bedford Forrest (though the daughters of the Confederacy who sponsored the site managed to misspell his name). Antebellum homes built with slave labour dot the streets, still showing damage from a destructive 2023 tornado.
Black votes have been critical to Democratic party fortunes for ages. Bill Clinton was touted as the “first Black president,” such was his popularity. African-Americans were solidly behind Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, overwhelmingly backed Obama and it was Biden’s support from Black voters in South Carolina that rescued his candidacy and put him on the road to victory in 2020. While Biden won 92 per cent of the Black vote in 2020, recent polls show his popularity languishing around 63 per cent.
It’s not hard to imagine that a much more substantial tourism business could be developed based on Selma’s undeniable historic importance and powerful emotional pull, which still reverberates so many decades after the events took place. Much bigger attractions have been built in the U.S. on much less raw material. Somehow it hasn’t happened. For whatever reasons, the annual March 7 pilgrimage hasn’t extended to more impactful assistance.
Selma is 79 per cent Black, with a 29 per cent poverty rate and a US$31,000 (C$42,000) median household income. During her appearance, Vice-President Harris spoke emotively of the crisis in the Mideast. “The conditions are inhumane and our common humanity compels us to act,” she said, calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza. It’s a vital issue of international concern that absolutely requires solving. But given the place and the circumstances, the people of Selma might have been more impressed by signs the Democrats are equally animated by concerns closer to home.
National Post
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