Selma: A Battlefield for Civil Rights

Selma: A Battlefield for Civil Rights January 16, 2012
Walking down the quiet and beautiful streets of Selma, Alabama, it is very difficult to imagine the events they witnessed on March 7, 1965.  Approximately 600 marchers set out from Brown Chapel AME Church (pictured below) to Montgomery, to protest the hostility towards blacks who wished to register to vote which had led to the death of one young man.
Governor Wallace ordered the march stopped.  The streets of peaceful Selma turned into mayhem as state troopers and local sheriff deputies beat the marchers with billy clubs and used tear gas to disperse them at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  Officers chased marchers which included women and children back into their homes and Brown Chapel continuing the intimidation for hours.

 

 

The violence and brutality of this bloody incident fueled support for the marchers throughout the nation and world.  Images were broadcast throughout the world.  Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized a simple symbolic march across the bridge.  On March 21st, people gathered once again at Brown Chapel and this time successfully marched to Montgomery in four days.  MLK delivered a powerful speech titled “How Long, Not Long” at the steps of the capitol building as thousands gathered on Dexter Avenue to conclude the march.

 

 

Among the things MLK said in that speech, the line below demonstrates his determination and his conviction that he had to be faithful to his calling as a modern day prophet to bring about radical change in society by which he would shame the strong and empower the weak.  Through MLK’s work, “God has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly” (words of Our Lady in the Gospel of Luke).
“They told us we wouldn’t get here.  And there are those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘we ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around’.”
Pictures are mine, all rights reserved.

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