Selma: 50 Years Later

It’s the 50th anniversary of the day Alabama State Troopers beat back the civil rights activists led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama. President Obama is in Selma, and he just stood on the Edmund Pettus bridge, a bridge named for a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and made a powerful speech about race, racism, voting rights, and “unfair sentencing and overcrowded prisons.” He acknowledged the racist killings of black men in America by police. Another unarmed black man was killed by police in Madison, Wisconsin last night, but the President didn’t mention that killing specifically. During his speech, some protesters beat drums and shouted, “Ferguson is here! We want change! Black Lives Matter!” 

Obama, without missing a beat but somehow incorporating the protest, said, “We’re Native Americans. We’re the slaves who built the White House. We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets. We’re immigrants who crossed the Rio Grande River so our children could have a better life.... We’re artists, musicians....” 

In a speech both accessible and eloquent, he quoted gay male writers: Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes. He thanked the black women and the white women who fought for suffrage for all people. He invoked hope and courage. He reminded us that voting rights are threatened once again, and that apathy and cynicism keep people from voting. He said, “Action requires that we shed our cynicism.... Change depends on our efforts, our attitudes, the things we teach our children.” It’s hard not to be cynical when you live in a corporatocracy. Excellent Guardian article is here. 

However not one major commercial television station in America carried the speech nor the events surrounding it. Not NBC, CBS, ABC, nor even NPB. It was one of the most eloquent presidential speeches in my lifetime, one of the few that has ever addressed racism, but very few people heard it. I have only the cheapest TV arrangement, so like other economically-challenged people, I couldn’t turn on the TV and see it. I watched it on my laptop, on the White House Youtube channel. That’s where I got the shot above.

The President quoted James Baldwin, “We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.” He took that quotation out of context, and when you read the full quotation, you get a picture of how very different this President is from all the others we’ve had. Baldwin was talking about capitalist aggression in places like pre-Castro Cuba. He was talking about the oppression of the poor, the domination of the rich, and the need for revolution. 

Here’s the full paragraph from which that sentence comes, which I believe our President had in mind when he gave the speech: “We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is. Anyway, the point here is that we are living in an age of revolution, whether we will or no, and that America is the only Western nation with both the power, and, as I hope to suggest, the experience that may help to make these revolutions real and minimize the human damage.” 
―James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963).

That was 1963. Now I think America is the last possible Western nation capable of reversing the power of corporatism. But maybe some other country will show that it does have the power and experience to do that. That’s my thought, not Baldwin’s and not Obama’s. But I’m glad we have a President who can read and talk and think about what James Baldwin said. I want to close by pasting in a few paragraphs that I want to remember. I’m sorry for the length of this post, but I want to keep these words and think about them longer. 

President Obama: “Just this week, I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country. I understand the question, for the report’s narrative was woefully familiar. It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement. But I rejected the notion that nothing’s changed. What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic, or sanctioned by law and custom; and before the Civil Rights Movement, it most surely was.

“We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing’s changed in the past fifty years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the Fifties. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress – our progress – would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.

“Of course, a more common mistake is to suggest that racism is banished, that the work that drew men and women to Selma is complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the “race card” for their own purposes. We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true. We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character – requires admitting as much.”


Thank you, Mr. President.