Selma
1965-2005 -- 3
As parable, Selma is now an occasion for confronting the mythical character of our comforting white liberal view of history as progress.
 Nuns join the line in Selma. |
We, or at least I, once saw in Selma a great landmark of liberation, not only for the black citizens of the South, but for a much larger progressive constituency that came together there, flexed its new-found muscles, and made powers and principalities totter. Despite the ambiguity of the local aftermath in Selma, as described in Selma 1965, that sense was still strong when the book first appeared, in 1974. |
By the second edition, in 1984, the limitations of the franchise won there were becoming clear, and were outlined in a Postscript. There was still a sense of "progress," but it was mixed and spotty; the impact of black voting had been trimmed and hemmed in. The persistence of Black Belt poverty seemed especially intractable.
And what of today? The 2004 election in Alabama was in tune with larger American trends: it was capped by the defeat of an amendment to remove language mandating segregated schools from the state constitution. The opponents, led by the state’s "Christian Coalition," insisted that they were fine with removing the racial language; their real objection, they said, was to the amendment’s companion language guaranteeing the state’s youths a public education. To an outsider, the latter is hardly less troublesome than the former. Meantime, Alabama public schools have been resegregating, and those serving students of color are chronically under-funded and underperforming, in a vicious cycle. As one black churchgoer told the Washington Post, "There are people here who are still fighting the Civil War . . . .They’re holding on to things that are long since past. It’s almost like a religion."
(Roig-Franzia)The remark was dead-on, except for the word "almost."
As Alabama has gone, so went the country. The once heady sense of making progress, so tangible and thrilling as we tramped along Highway 80, is a memory. Today white liberals are getting a bitter taste of what it can mean to be a subject population – to live in our own Selma 1964, or more like 1904.
Thus the parable. Our bourgeois comforts remain, for the moment; but that steady trickling sound we hear in the background is the middle class melting like glaciers in the glare of global warming. At best, we are besieged on all sides, staging rearguard actions, seeking safe harbors in which to survive and perhaps prepare to fight another day. Finding refuge is increasingly difficult, though.
In this setting, the Selma campaign to this white liberal is no longer a herald of the new day, the great society, with us marching in the vanguard, arm in arm.
What remains is more like a prophecy, a sign of what may happen at some distant time, some kairos. beyond the current dim horizon of events.
This sign has more than one aspect. For many of us who were there, Selma showed that very flawed humans can become, if only briefly, something more, an irresistible force when the Spirit inter-venes through them in our mundane affairs to "turn and overturn." In addition, and perhaps even more important, Selma is at once a memorial and a reminder that religion can be something different than the competing bloody fundamentalisms surrounding us today: a force for discovering, naming and building what the movement called "the beloved community," across lines of sect and culture.
And as prophecies are meant to do, this one evokes a sacred past to point toward a potential future. But as it does so, it reminds us, as Dr. King said, that "there are difficult days ahead," which could well include "a season of suffering." But as he also declared, towering in the pulpit at Brown Chapel, "Unearned suffering is redemptive." This is the real truth of Selma, what has stayed with me above all in the intervening years. It is a truth from which we liberals mostly flee, but it is also a truth which we now may be unable to escape.
And it is a truth that only makes sense in a religious context. Thus if there is as yet promise for us in the Selma portrayed in Selma 1965, I believe it will be found by looking to the example of the black churches as an example and starting point.
The many evident flaws of these groups are not hidden in my book; yet during the long preceding decades when their congregants were exiled from the political realm, the churches nurtured the endurance that kept hope alive. When they were silenced in the public square, this was where their voices were heard. It was there that the redemptive and liberating images were preserved and ritually evoked. And in the fullness of time, they were the seedbed of and platform for the movement when it rose again.
Remembering the pathetic attempts of white liberals to sing the movement’s freedom songs, it seems absurd to me to think we could find our way to a version of the sustaining spirituality of the southern black churches. Yet as best I can descry, something like that is now our task. "Can these bones live?" (Ezekiel 37:3)
It’s the kind of question we once heard in the movement mass meetings, and it would bring a smile to Dr. King’s face. Can these bones live?
No question, it would take a miracle. But then, I’m a churchgoer, so I believe in miracles.
And why not? I saw them happen, in Selma 1965.
WORKS CITED
 Camp Selma, one of many
such prison camps, where I spent a week as a prisoner in February, 1965. |
 A country store in Lowndes County. |
(ABC) Australian Broadcasting Corporation, "‘Holy war’ general linked to Iraq prison scandal," Last Update: Wednesday, May 12, 2004. Online at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1106865.htm
Biography of Boykin, online at:
http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/82949
Cooper, Richard T., "General Casts War in Religious Terms," Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2003.
Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949. Tuscaloosa, AL, 1999.
Hackney, Sheldon. Populism to Progressivism in Alabama. Princeton 1969.
Roig-Franzia, Manuel, "Alabama Vote Opens Old Racial Wounds
School Segregation Remains a State Law as Amendment Is Defeated." The Washington Post, November 28, 2004.
(USCCR), U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report: "Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election," June 2001." Online at:
http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/main.htm
Vann Woodward, C. Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. New York, Rinehart, 1938.
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