EVERYDAY IS SELMA Report from the Southern Movement Assembly 1965 2015 Everyday is Selma. In 1965, Tuskegee students paused at the apex of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and said a silent prayer for Willie Edwards, a 24 year-old Black man who had been thrown into the Alabama River by the Klan eight years before. In 2015, a new generation of Southern freedom movement fighters walked that same bridge in Selma and paused to remember the many lives that have been lost to racist state violence in the last few years - Michael Brown, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, Islan Nettles, Rekia Boyd. We remember Ernesto Javier Canepa Diaz who was killed by police on the border and the thousands more that have suffered from deportations, harassment in high schools, unsafe communities, and mass incarceration. In 1965, community people from Alabama, young people in SNCC & local college students were at the forefront of building southern freedom movement force, making history in Selma and across Dallas, Lowndes, Perry, and Wilcox counties, Alabama. It was these ordinary people, often considered deviants in their own time, who pushed the ministers and other establishment leaders to either join with or get out of the way of a change they knew was possible. In 2015, as part of the national commemoration of Bloody Sunday, a Southern Movement Assembly (SMA) delegation of almost 100 people, deviants in our own right, converged in Selma to exercise and build our collective power. A sanitized version of history is always more palatable to the establishment of the day. However, as students of our Southern movement history, the SMA delegation fought to shine a light on critical history that shows ordinary people risked their lives and reputations to stand up against the most powerful forces of their day. The Southern Freedom Movement was not a feel good movement - it was a fight hard movement, and today, we are part of a fight hard movement that is growing the power of our collective action to demand “Enough is Enough.” The Ordinary People’s Society (TOPS), a SMA anchor organization, has been working in Alabama for over a decade to expand voting rights and build political power for formerly incarcerated people. TOPS made the call for the SMA organizations to mobilize and converge in Alabama, and although we work on many different frontlines of struggle we all work in the spirit of the words Fannie Lou Hamer said, “Nobody is Free Until Everyone’s Free.” We met with local leaders in Selma and Alabama to recognize that the fight for voting rights is a fight for political power. The SMA united our fight on historic ground in Alabama to support the current struggles for political power and build movements to stop state sanctioned violence today. Everyday is Bloody Sunday. Glory Kilanko, founder and director of Women Watch Afrika made that statement on a recent weekly call with Southern movement leaders. Our international delegation of 100 people from 15 organizations and 7 Southern states represents Black communities, youth, elders, families, Latinos, Muslim communities from Iran and Sudan, LGBTQ communities, and formerly incarcerated people. We recognize the danger and strength of claiming our political power in a moment when institutions are telling us that murder, disenfranchisement, and economic displacement are allowable, legitimate, and justifiable. We name state violence as the cause of our people’s suffering through both neglect and direct proliferation. We learn from and regenerate the Southern Freedom Movement today from the bottom up because we know that until the most oppressed stand together, social justice will not be delivered.
On the 50th anniversary on this historic site, we remember the massacres and forced removal of indigenous Muscogee, Choctow, and Creek peoples from this land, we remember Bloody Sunday, the March to Montgomery that followed, the powerful resistance of youth movements, and the legacy of ordinary people, then and now, fighting for extraordinary demands to live full, productive, and dignified lives. This memory is why we organize and know that together we will win. Nobody is Free Until Everybody is Free.
2 In this Report: Everyday is Selma - SMA Statement ...... Pg 2 A People’s Victory on the Bridge, Project South . . . . . Pg 5 Selma 50 - Sankofa Moment, Spirithouse ...... Pg. 6 Many Faces of Selma, University Sin Fronteras ...... Pg 8 Gwen Patton, Alabama SNCC Veteran ...... Pg 10 150 Year History of Black Political Power in AL ...... Pg 11 This weekend restored my faith in people. To come here and see people so intent and caring about other people, that was huge. There were moments when I had to remind myself to be patient and observe what is going on, to take things in and translate things. I’m very Nigerian. I want to go back home and do things there. - Joy Kigawa, Women Watch Afrika, Clarkston GA
How soon can we take the Backwards March to all of your communties? We are going to take it everywhere. On the bridge we said, “Educate, don’t incarcerate.” We can’t stop here. - Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, T.O.P.S., Dothan AL
It seems like whenever I happened to talk to someone standing near me, they turned out to be ordinary people who had participated in some way in 1965 and had a lot of history to share. I wish there had been programs to hear from them, not only about what they did in 1965, but what they have experienced and done each decade since then. - Cita Cook, Project South & the University Sin Fronteras, Atlanta GA
4 A People’s Victory on the Bridge Reflection by Project South
At the 50th commemoration of Selma, it was ordinary people, who do extraordinary things, leading the 75,000 people marching across the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge. As rumors and misinformation flew around the internet about what happened in Selma on the weekend of the commemoration, the Southern Movement Assembly delegation has amplified the powerful reasons why there were no big celebrities leading the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge 50 years after Bloody Sunday. While the TV preachers, famous speakers and their handlers remained at Brown Chapel, local leader Rose Sanders Toure made a bold call not to wait. Rose and countless unnamed people have kept the flame of history lit, commemorating the significant moment when state violence attacked the Southern Freedom Movement foot soldiers of 1965 on that bridge. On March 8, 2015, under the gaze of a national spotlight, the people’s movement started with a Backwards March of formerly incarcerated people, youth, elder movement veterans, international refugees, LGBTQ folks, and grassroots organizers. Those who fight on every frontline, resisted being erased by the idea of individual, iconic leadership by wearing bright gold banners that read: “We are the Peoples Movement, Leadership from the Bottom-up.” The Backwards March parted at the bottom of the bridge, and Rev. Glasgow with The Ordinary Peoples Society (TOPS) led the march back over the bridge with Rose, the Southern Movement Assembly, and partner organizations. Representing the rising tide of the Formerly Incarcerated People’s Movement, Rev. Kenneth Glasgow has been organizing a ‘Backwards March’ over the bridge since 2007, a week before the Jubilee Crossing to express the need for our movements to ‘go back, get it right, and go forward with everyone who has been forgotten or left behind.’ In 2015, 50 years later, it was the People’s Movement of today that reclaimed the bridge for the people, for our collective memories, and for the current frontline battles against state violence, economic displacement, mass incarceration, and injustice. As Rev. Glasgow says in a short video highlighting this victory: "The people are tired. We will not wait . . . Enough is Enough. Unite to Fight." The Southern Movement Assembly recognizes the fierce leadership of local Alabama freedom fighters past, present, and future and is calling for action over the next two years to grow the Southern Freedom Movement of the 21st century with the Southern People's Initiative. See www.southtosouth.org for more information. 5 Selma 50, Sankofa Moment Reflection by SpiritHouse
Recently, four members of SpiritHouse Inc., left Durham NC, to join our Southern Movement Alliance (SMA) comrades, in Selma AL, for the 50th Anniversary of the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing. This historic weekend was a commemoration of the first of three attempted marches, from Selma to Montgomery, to secure voting rights for Blacks in Alabama. The violent, state sanctioned, retaliation on March 7, 1965, by the Alabama State Troopers, led to that march forever being known as “Bloody Sunday.” Upon our arrival, we paid tribute to those who marched and survived unimaginable beatings on that day, and we joined our fellow SMA anchor organization, The Ordinary People’s Society (T.O.P.S.) to lead their annual Backwards March across the same historic bridge. T.O.P.S. whose goal is “to create, build, promote and maintain a better humanity by remaining open to the needs of people in our society,” has been leading the Backwards March, in Selma, since 2007 because, as founder Rev. Kenneth Glasgow says, “we have to go back and get some things right before we can move forward.” As we drove from our hotel through Montgomery we talked about the similarities between the Backwards March and the West African Sankofa proverb. The Sankofa which literally means “it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot,” is symbolized by a mythological bird that is flying forward while looking back in the opposite direction. In its mouth (or sometimes carried on its back) is an egg that represents the future. Black people separated and displaced across the diaspora have been returning to fetch lost pieces of ourselves for generations. After the abolition of slavery, it was not uncommon for formerly enslaved and runaway Blacks to return to the places where they had been held captive in hopes of finding the loved ones they had lost or reconnecting to the land that had absorbed so much of their blood and sweat. Today, many of us continue this journey by participating in events like the Selma 50th, joining ancestry.com or sending swabs of our DNA off, searching for pieces that will make us whole. And so, from Durham to Alabama, between Erykah Badu, J. Cole, and the O’Jays, we talked about the omitted stories left behind in Selma and across this country. How many incarcerated family members, LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and women experiencing domestic and sexual violence, remained silent for the sake of the movement? How have these gaps in our individual and collective histories impacted our community? And what lessons are waiting for our retrieval? In his speech, held on Saturday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, President Obama spoke about how far we have come since 1965. He Today, young people, poor people, LGBTQ and formerly said that he “rejected incarcerated people, who have been pushed to the furthest the notion that nothing edges & made invisible, are refusing to remain silent. has changed” [in this country], and that “to 6 What was incredible was the sheer amount of people I recognized in the street and in the churches. Knowing that we could see the layered aspect of people’s reactions to the struggles. People who are everyday organizing and working across the South were all in one space. What would happen if we just talked together about what should happen here in Selma? People were moving like an entity rather than like separate people. - Mya, Hunter, SpiritHouse, Durham NC
SpiritHouse Delegation included Nia Wilson, Omisade Burney, Mya Hunter, and Heather Lee.
deny our progress, would be to rob us of our own agency.” He acknowledged that there is still more work to be done, and referenced what has been happening in Ferguson as evidence of this. However, what he, and other presidents before him, failed to do, is to address those whom he/they intentionally abandoned for the sake of the most palatable progress. Today, America’s 40 year Drug War, which began just after the Civil Rights Era, has placed over 7 million (mostly poor, mostly Black) people under correctional control, stripping them of the very rights to jobs, education and housing, that were won by their elders. Today, according to a Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report entitled “Operation Ghetto Storm,” every 28 hours a Black person (mostly men between the ages of 15 and 35) is killed by police officers, security guards or vigilantes claiming self- defense.” Today, Trans women of color are being murdered at an alarming rate of almost one per week. And today, young people, poor people, LGBTQ and formerly incarcerated people, who have been pushed to the furthest edges and made invisible, are refusing to remain silent. These brilliant souls have learned from the lessons hidden in the retrieval and are not only telling their own stories, but they are uncovering and telling the stories of their past kin left behind. They are claiming justice for all as a human right with the understanding that it will not be accomplished until we include everyone in the process. Bravo to T.O.P.S and the people of Selma for embracing ancestral wisdom and reminding us to fetch and learn from our past. 7 The bridge experience created new knowledge of where the civil rights movement is today and where the struggle for liberation continues. Ruben Solis Garcia - University Sin Fronteras
Many Faces of Selma Reflection from the Universiy Sin Fronteras
The bridge at Selma (I will not call by its colonial and racist name) united the people there - grandmothers and grandchildren, parents, sons and daughters, families, individuals, all marching together over the bridge. It was a LIBERATION bridge. The people led the march over the bridge at Selma, not the politicos. The people came because they needed to be there not for the nostalgia of the brutal repression 50 years ago on Bloody Sunday, but more so for the frontline struggles of today. The people at the bridge were not there for Obama there were there for Michael Brown and the many young Black (and Brown) men and women being assassinated by the hour in the U.S. today. Of course, the media shared a photo showing Obama and the politicos leading a march and showed a row of political operatives advancing their agenda for the elections in 2016. We mingled with 75,000 people marching for justice in the long road to liberation paved with short-term civil rights and voting gains. The struggle, and the people, have also suffered set backs like the assassination with total impunity of Dr. King in 1968, and Malcolm X just a few weeks before Blood Sunday. “Selma” is the Call to Action for the new Southern Freedom Movement of the 21st century, and one to address the new situation and political moment in the US global South to confront and dismantle racism, and the structures of oppression and militarized state violence. We must build our movements, our Southern peoples power and make change by dismantling the old and building the new society. The first steps have been taken on the Selma Bridge on March 8, 2015. Fifty years from now we will look back and say, it all started that day when the people took over the leadership of the old civil rights movement and made it a human rights movement and Southern peoples governance. If it came down to giving our lives, would we be willing to do that? What politicians have built careers and made money off of taking advantage of people giving their lives? How do we decolonize our own movement? Political education is about organizing and vice-versa. How do we begin to learn about each other’s struggles so we can understand the enemy and call the enemy by a first and last name? This weekend had a lot of beautiful moments and a lot of contradiction. A highlight was going from one side of the bridge to the other, seeing all these people from different frontline struggles, with different emotional responses. One movement brother was about to weep. Others were celebratory, eventhough we were walking over a bridge where someone had been thrown over by the Klan. People were inspired. Others were angry about fighting the same fights. Some people were just remembering. - Ash-Lee Henderson, Project South, Atlanta GA
My experience in Selma was like none I have had before. Just being in such a historical place gave me immense happiness. I can honestly say that it is definitely going down in history as the most memorable event ever. - Malika Benoit, Project South Youth Leadership Team
Selma, I think is very important in our history. My great- grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother lived through events like in Selma. They had to sit at the back of the bus, get their food from the backs of buildings, and had to move off sidewalks to let white people pass. The history that impacted Selma impacts our organizing today. - Nicole Enos, Project South Youth Leadership Team
I really appreciated the young people and their readiness to step up, to use their live energy. It was amazing to be alongside them on Saturday. When we did the chanting together across the front of the room, we busted the myth that older people and younger people don’t work together. We were all ages and we were having a good time up there. – Nia Wilson, SpiritHouse, Durham NC
I feel like I stand out in a place like this, as a Chicano, as a cholito, not seeing a lot of folks who look like me. That’s all right because people can see that I’m moving in solidarity. - Joaquin Abrego, Southwest Workers Union, San Antonio TX
9 I think of the ancestors on whose shoulders we do the work we do. We had to put our foot on this ground. This was clearest at the march. In my country, Nigeria, people who have done so much work in the movement, when they come to crowds like this, they sit and watch the young leaders who are taking over because they want to go to the grave feeling accomplished that they have handed over. When we came out with the young people, it was transformative leadership. - Glory Kilanko, Women Watch Afrika, Clarkston GA
Gwen Patton Speaks Truth to History Gwen Patton, Alabama SNCC veteran & one of Project South’s founders, spoke to the Southern Movement Assembly Governance Council meeting on Monday, March 9th following the Selma activities. “I’m honored to serve as an elder adviser and so pleased that you are in coalition, that no one is trying to subsume anybody else. That was a mistake we made. The Tuskegee Institute Advancement League (TIAL) had existed for a while and refused to join SNCC. It would have been far better to have a piece of stationery with a heap of organizations on it. Learn the lay of the ground you organize on. Alabama had organized union workers in steel in Birmingham, including African Americans. We had organized coal workers. Our struggles had always involved fighting racism. We had organized the Mobile Longshoreman, United Mine Workers, the U.S. Steel Workers. We were not a single crop state like Mississippi. When Lowndes County people migrated north, it was to Detroit and the automobile industry. We then brought the UAW skills back down to Lowndes County. We came up with the concepts of self-determination and the right to defend ourselves. We came up with the Black Panther because the panther is not an offensive animal. It fights only out of defense. During the forties, when they were trying to spread the CIO [in the South], students at Tuskegee supported the CIO. When the bread man came on campus with scabs, the students threw the bread off the truck. The Civil Rights actions in Montgomery & Tuskegee come out of that. As long as I’m living, I’m going to tell people about that. There are three components you need to consider for success: 1) I don’t want you to think that mobilization is a movement. You have to have infrastructure (such as the church you are meeting in now, people preparing breakfast). Where are you going to sleep? Where is the community support? 2) You have to be careful about provocateurs. I’m a victim of COINTELPRO. They are dangerous people. We didn’t think it was a badge of honor to be beaten. We wanted to live. We weren’t about going to jail or quitting school. When the police said “Halt,” we halted because we had gotten the evil eye. We used to talk about the Freedom High. There is no need to give the police provocation. You have to have a different mindset. Provocateurs are not just police. They are in your ranks. 3) You have to have vision. What do people want? Back in the day, it was the vote. We tried for a long time to get rid of the grand jury. The cause has to be a tangible desire that people can feel, taste, experience. Something transformational. Infrastructure, mobilization, a vision that is going to change public policy. Have an idea rather than one leader. The text of her full talk, transcribed by Cita Cook,can be found on southtosouth.org 10 Speaking of History . . . 150 Year Timeline on Black Political Power in Dallas, Lowndes, Perry, & Wilcox Counties, Alabama 1860: In Dallas County, there were 27,760 enslaved African Americans (more than in any other Alabama county), 80 “free colored,” and 7,785 white people; in Lowndes County: 19,340 / 14 / 8,362; in Perry County: 18,206 / 39 / 9,479; and in Wilcox County: 17,797 / 26 / 6,795. January 11, 1861: Alabama joined the Confederate States of America. The Civil War began in April. April 1865: Shortly before the end of the Civil War, Union forces arrived in Selma, burned much of it, and defeated Confederate troops led by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest (later the founder of the Ku Klux Klan). December 6, 1865: The Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was ratified, making unconstitutional slavery and “involuntary servitude,” except for condemned criminals. 1867: African Americans in Lowndes County held a series of political meetings and about 4,000 men registered to vote. Former slave, farmer, and merchant, Benjamin Sterling Turner, was elected the Tax Collector of Dallas County. 1868: Armed black men assembled at the courthouse in Hayneville (Lowndes County) and demanded that the white men in local offices who had supported the Confederacy step down from their positions as Congress had ruled they should do. Eventually, all either stepped down or were defeated by black voters. 1868: Some white men in Lowndes County shot and killed an African American simply for showing up at a Democratic meeting without an invitation. July 9, 1868: The Fourteenth Amendment granted to all Americans equal protection of the laws and due process of law. This made the denial of civil rights to African Americans unconstitutional. February 3, 1870: The Fifteenth Amendment established that any action taken to restrict (male) citizens’ right to vote because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” was unconstitutional. 1870: Rev. Mansfield Tyler, a formerly enslaved person from Lowndes County, and Jeremiah Haralson, a formerly enslaved preacher from Selma, were elected to the Alabama House of Representatives. Benjamin Turner, from Dallas County, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he advocated for racially mixed schools and financial reparations for former slaves. 1871: A new Alabama constitution took the right to vote away from African Americans. 1872: James T. Rapier, an ex-slave from Lowndes County, was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives. 1874: Jeremiah Haralson was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives. 1875: Hugh A. Carson, an ex-slave from Lowndes County, was elected a delegate to the Alabama Constitutional Convention and then, along with William Gaskin, became a state representative. White Democrats regained control of the Alabama state government and expelled any remaining black legislators, including Gaskin and Carson. Ex-Confederates replaced them. 1880: On election day, when black voters in Lowndes County outnumbered white voters, Democrat Walter L. Bragg shouted from the courthouse steps, “Yes, boys, stuff the ballot boxes....Lowndes County must be cleaned.” Previously, Democrats had lost elections by 3.000 votes; this year they won by 1,600. 1882: After a number of years using voter fraud and terrorism to oppose black citizens gaining political power, white Democrats took over all of the offices in Lowndes County. 1900: There were over five thousand black registered voters in Lowndes County. 1901: Alabama changed the state constitution to require a $1.50 cumulative poll tax (covering earlier years after a man had turned twenty-one), a literacy test, and proof of good moral character to vote except for ex-Confederate soldiers and their descendants. The number of black registered voters in the Black Belt dropped to about 1% of the adult population. 1903: Federal investigators were run out of Lowndes County at gunpoint when they tried to investigate the ways in which Sheriff J. W. Dixon was abusing black prisoners leased to white employers. When Dillard Freeman tried to leave the county to see his sick brother, for example, Dixon beat him brutally and then chained him to his employer’s bed. Warren Reese, a federal prosecutor, stated that Lowndes County was the worst perpetrator of convict leasing. 1918: Charles J. Adams, a World War I veteran and railroad worker in Selma, established one of the two first Alabama chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Mid-1920s: Charles J. Adams and others in Selma organized the Dallas County Voters League. 1936: Amelia Platts Boynton, Samuel W. Boynton, the Rev. Frederick Reece, Charles J. Adams and others brought back to life the Dallas County Voters League. 1939-1971: P. C. “Lummie” Jenkins became the sheriff for Wilcox County. The white community considered him a witty storyteller who did not need to use a gun. The black community thought of him as the biggest threat to their security in the county. 1942: A new bridge across the Alabama River into Selma was named for Edmund Pettus, a Confederate General and leader of the local Ku Klux Klan, who lived in Selma from 1858 until his death in 1907. 11 1944: In Smith v. Allwright, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that primary elections held by political parties that allowed only white people to vote (meaning the Democratic Party in the South) were unconstitutional. 1945: The Boswell Amendment to the Alabama Constitution allowed country registrars to deny the right to register to vote to anyone unable to “understand and explain” satisfactorily any section of the U. S. Constitution. 1946: The Alabama Constitution was amended to require that applicants to register to vote be able to copy and explain a portion of the state charter. January 1952–May 1954: With the support of the Dallas County Voters League, 74 African Americans registered to vote. 1953–1957: After a series of rapes and attempted rapes in Dallas County of white females, including a daughter of the mayor of Selma, by an unidentified African American, William Earl Fikes was arrested. After protracted questioning, Fikes was sentenced to 99 years for one rape, but prominent white citizens of Selma decided the sentence was too lenient and demanded another trial for other charges. The second jury sentenced him to death. With the help of NAACP lawyers and widespread support from the African American community, the verdict was appealed. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled in 1957 that the pressure put on Fikes when he was questioned meant that his confession should not stand. He was not released from prison, however, until 1971. During the trial in Selma, African American families brought their children to see black attorneys and witnesses standing up to white officials and many joined the NAACP for the first time. The case led to stronger unity for justice in the black community and more opposition to rights for African Americans in the white community. June 1956: The state of Alabama banned the N.A.A.C.P., leading the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and other black ministers in Birmingham to found the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). January 23, 1957: Four members of the Ku Klux Klan forced Willie Edwards Jr., an African American truck driver, to jump off a bridge in Montgomery County; his body was later found downstream. They had misidentified Edwards as a man they believed was dating a white woman. 1950s: With the support of the Dallas County Voters League, Marie Foster led Citizenship Classes. She later stated that “several Black people were killed during this period.” 1958: Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to death by a jury in Marion (Perry County) for stealing $1.95. He received support from all over the world. Although the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the sentence, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles complained to Governor Jim Folsom about the damage the case was doing to the international reputation of the United States and Folsom granted Wilson clemency. 1960: After voter fraud gave an election to the whites, black people formed the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights. 1961: When Lonnie Brown read an article in the local paper saying that Negroes did not want to vote, he and a few others established the Wilcox County Civic and Progressive League (WCCPI). At that time, there were no blacks registered in Wilcox and Lowndes Counties, even though their population was about 80% African American. Summer 1962: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers Bernard Lafayette and Colia Liddell Lafayette arrived in Selma, having volunteered after Jim Foreman said it was too hard a place to convince people to vote. At that time 156 out of the 5,000 eligible black residents were registered. January 1963: James Austin, a young man who had talked with Colia Lafayette, started voter education classes, with the assistance of Amelia Boynton and Marie Foster. May 14, 1963: The Lafayettes combined a memorial service for Samuel Boynton with a voting workshop and rally. The 350 people had to sing in the church until about 1AM to wait for Sheriff Jim Clark, his posse, and other members of a white mob stopped circling the church. According to the local paper, “most of the attendees were teenagers from Hudson High School.” June 12, 1963: NAACP leader Medgar Evers was murdered by a Klansman in Jackson, Mississippi and Bernard Lafayette was beaten almost to death by a white supremacist who had pretended to need help with his car. He ran off when a black neighbor came out with a shotgun. June-December 1963: Hudson High School students, too young to register to vote, became more willing than their parents to demonstrate and go to jail. Whenever police drove students back to the high school, they walked out the rear door and returned to the meeting. The jails were sometimes so crowded that they had to take turns standing up during the night. Jackie McCracken said that when a policeman struck him on his rear end with an electric cattle prod, it “hurt beyond description.” The white school officials refused to give diplomas to some of the demonstrators. Thirty-two teachers who became involved lost their jobs. October 7, 1963: During a Freedom Day march in Selma on one of the two days of the month when voter registration was possible, 350 African Americans lined up, but only forty were allowed to apply. Police assaulted some of them, including two SNCC workers giving water to people in line, while two Justice Department lawyers and two FBI agents watched. 1963-1965: The Justice Department filed four lawsuits against discriminatory voting laws in Dallas County, and the number of black registered voters increased from 167 to 383. 1964: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) set up an office in Selma to organize for voting rights there and in surrounding counties. They arranged for people in Lowndes County to hear tapes of lectures Malcolm X gave every week in New York City. 12 July 10. 1964: Circuit Judge James Hare issued an injunction making it illegal for three or more people to congregate in Dallas County. Sheriff Clark enforced this into the fall, but “the Courageous Eight” (eight adults who had been active for many years) just called secret meetings. November 1964: Leaders of the Dallas County Voters League asked Dr. King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to come to Selma to add to the pressure for voter registration. January 2, 1965: Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at a mass meeting in Brown Chapel in Selma pm a day when Sheriff Clark was out of town and Police Chief Baker agreed not to interfere. January 3, 1965: When Tuskegee Institute Advancement League (TIAL) and SNCC organizer Sammy Younge Jr. used a whites-only public toilet, a white attendant shot and killed him. January 18-February 5, 1965: Over 2.400 demonstrators in Selma were jailed. At one of the demonstrations, Annie Lee Cooper, a practical nurse who had been active since 1963, struck Sheriff Clark when he twisted her arm. Photographers spread around the nation pictures of the beating she received. January 22, 1965: 105 black teachers marched and went to register to vote in Selma, even though they were beaten and their jobs were at stake. January 30, 1965: Over 600 adults tried to register to vote in Perry County while about the same number of their children, with the help of SNCC and the Perry County Civic League, tested the ability to eat in public places because of the 1964 Civil Rights Law. Eleven students were arrested and then 850 people demonstrating against those arrests were arrested as well. Some of the adults lost their jobs. February 1, 1965: Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy planned to be arrested by Chief Baker so that they would be in the city jail instead of under the control of Sheriff Clark; they refused to post bond until February 5. In Perry County, 700 students and adults, including James Orange, were arrested. February 4, 1965: Malcolm X spoke in Selma and told Coretta Scott King that he would begin recruiting in Alabama later that month. Mobile Judge Daniel H. Thomas issued an injunction suspending the Alabama literacy test and requiring the Registrar in Dallas County to stop discriminating against people seeking to register to vote there (but not in other counties). February 10, 1965: Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark forced 165 black youth to run out of town to avoid being hit by patrol cars. February 18, 1965: A demonstration led by C. T. Vivian was held at night in Marion (Perry County) to protest the arrest of SCLC organizer James Orange for “contributing to the delinquency of minors” by involving them in the voter registration campaign. After turning off the street lights, state troopers and local police began attacking everyone brutally, including those who had escaped into a nearby cafe. When Jimmie Lee Jackson tried to stop the attacks on his mother and the 82-year-old grandfather, he was shot by a state trooper, James Bonnard Fowler. Eight days later, Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old Vietnam vet, a church deacon, and the only bread-winner in his family, died in a Selma hospital. Al Lingo, the head of the state troopers sent an arrest warrant to Jackson’s hospital room but Fowler faced no disciplinary action. February 21, 1965: Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City. March 7, 1965: State troopers beat and tear-gassed many of the 600 people who were trying to march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the denial of the right to vote. SNCC organizer John Lewis was given a cracked skull and Amelia Boynton was beaten and gassed nearly to death. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized, leading to the day becoming known as Bloody Sunday. March 9, 1965: As many people flocked to Selma to show their support of the local people, Dr. King led about 2,500 back onto the bridge but ended up obeying the court order not to march to Montgomery by turning around after everyone had kneeled in prayer. March 11, 1965: Four members of the Ku Klux Klan in Selma beat three white ministers with clubs. After Selma’s public hospital refused to help Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from the North, he was taken to Birmingham, where he died the next day. Tuskegee students opened a second front of the struggle in Montgomery, where they were joined by James Bevel and others from SNCC for a major demonstration at the state capitol on March 15 and 16, where they were again beaten. Seven Selma solidarity activists sat in at the East Wing of the White House until they were arrested. Other protests occurred in over eighty cities. President Johnson met the next day with Governor George Wallace and told him to protect the marchers. March 15, 1965: President Johnson spoke to Congress saying that the cause of the demonstrators in Selma was also their cause. Two days later, he submitted voting rights legislation to Congress. March 21-25, 1965: A successful march from Selma to Montgomery started with 8,000 people and ended with about 25,000 people at the state capitol, where Dr. King gave the speech “How Long, Not Long.” March 25, 1965: When Viola Liuzzo, a white SNCC supporter from Detroit, let a young black man ride in her front seat as she drove him back to Selma, Klan members in Lowndes County chased them and killed her. An FBI informant, who may or may not have fired the fatal shot, testified against three of the men, but Lowndes County jurors still ruled for first a hung jury and then for an acquittal. 13 August 6, 1965: President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, forcing the officials of Lowndes County to allow black men and women to register to vote. August 13, 1965: About thirty young people protesting discrimination at a store in Fort Deposit were arrested and taken to jail in Hayneville. August 20, 1965: The officials in the Hayneville jail forced the protesters to leave without being allowed to call for SNCC protectors. When some of them went to buy sodas in a nearby store, Tom Coleman, recently deputized and told about their release, stood at the door with a shotgun. He murdered Jon Daniels, a white Episcopalian seminarian from New Hampshire, as Daniels pushed aside Ruby Sales, a Tuskegee student, saving her life. Coleman also severely wounded Father Richard F. Morrisoe, a white Catholic priest. He was acquitted of murder charges. November 1965: When black activists became involved in the election for members of local committees of the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service of the United States, they had only partial success, in part because of some local white people cheating. December 1965-1967: Tent City (also called Freedom City) was established by Highway 80 for sharecroppers and others who had lost their jobs and homes because they had registered to vote. In Detroit, the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights raised money to buy the 200 acres. 1966: The U. S. District Court ordered Lowndes County officials to allow women and all blacks to serve on juries for the first time in White v. Crook, a court case sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Pauli Murray, a black feminist, was one of the lawyers on the case. May 1966: After at least 2,500 black people registered to vote in Lowndes County, the local Democratic Party greatly increased the fees to run for office in the Democratic Primary (such as from $50 to $900). This led to the black leaders deciding to form a separate political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. The state required them to put a symbol on the ballot and they chose the Black Panther (which was later adopted by the Black Panther Party founded in Oakland, California). At regular meetings guarded by black men with shotguns, they distributed SNCC Voting Primers explaining county offices. May 3, 1966: The seven candidates for county offices from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization were cheated out of the victories they probably deserved. March 12, 1967: An arsonist destroyed the headquarters of the Lowndes County Self-Help Housing and Job Training, only about four months after it opened. They, nevertheless, kept the program going, including by building houses for people living in Tent City. 1968: Lowndes County activists renewed canvassing to register voters. Two African Americans were elected to be Justice of the Peace. Summer 1970: Darrell Prescott, a senior at Harvard University, volunteered in Wilcox County. He wrote a few months later that over the previous two years there, “a black man has been castrated, a white woman has shot a black male child, and a white doctor who is a member of the KKK has plotted to have the county’s black VISTA director assassinated.” In Selma, a policeman had beaten a black man to death on the street. Wilcox County voters, however, had defeated the re- election of Sheriff Lumbar Jenkins who, over the years, “had murdered many black people.” He vowed to arrest as many black people as possible before he had to leave office. 1970: John Hulett, a local black civil rights leader, was elected Sheriff of Lowndes County, a position he held for about twelve years. African Americans were also elected to be the coroner, the tax assessor, and the superintendent of education. 1972: Ernest Doyle, Rev. Lorenzo Harrison, Rev. William Kemp, James Kimbrough, and Rev. F. D. Reese were the first African Americans elected to the Selma City Council since Reconstruction. 1980: Almost all of the Lowndes County offices were held by African Americans. 1985: Smith v. Meese was a lawsuit against the U. S. Attorney-General by nine voters from Greene, Lowndes, Perry, Sumter, and Wilcox Counties in the name of all registered black voters in Alabama because white officials were asserting that black activists had misused absentee ballots, even though that was not the case and the government had never gone after the many forms of voter fraud by Black Belt white officials. The “Marion Three” were judged not guilty by a federal jury in Selma. 1996: SNCC veterans convinced Congress and President Clinton to designate the route of the march from Selma to Montgomery (passing through Lowndes County) a National Historical Trail. 2002: Almost two-thirds of the land in the ten Black Belt Counties (78% in Lowndes County and over 73% in Perry County) was owned by people or companies not located within the county of the land they owned. More than two-thirds of this land qualified for a sizable tax break. Much of that land was and is being used for timber farming and hunting leases to earn money from wealthy and corporate hunters. 2004: James Bonard Fowler, a retired Alabama state trooper, confessed to a journalist that he had killed Jimmie Lee Jackson in 1965. He insisted, however, that it was not murder, claiming, “He was trying to kill me, and I have no doubt in my mind…that if he would have gotten complete control of my pistol, that he would have killed me or shot me. That’s why my conscience is clear.” In 2010, he pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter and received a six month sentence. September 22, 2012: The Southern Movement Assembly met in Lowndes County at the site of Tent City. 2014: The main industries in Dallas County are International paper, Rayco Industrial, and Bush Hog. 27.4% of its residents are living below the poverty line.
14 Southern Movement Assembly in the Media Amplifying our Narrative
In THE ROOT: The Contradictions of Selma by Kristen West Savali
“What was beautiful to see was that while people were listening to Obama’s speech, there were also people who were spending that time organizing and talking long-term strategy,” said Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Regional Organizer with Project South.
Woodard Henderson gave credit to the Formerly Incarcerated People’s Movement, under the leadership of Rose Sanders and Kenneth Glasgow, for organizing one of the most cathartic moments of the weekend. No, it’s not over. Selma is now in communities all across this country. The conversation is no longer simply about how far we’ve come, but recognizing how far we have to go, something that President Obama also acknowledged during his speech. http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2015/03/the_ contradictions_of_selma50.html
In Equal Voice News: Selma’s “Backwards March” Ensures that the Legacy Lives http://www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org/in-selma-a-backwards-march- by-activists-to-get-it-right/
In our media: WWW.SOUTHTOSOUTH.ORG
VIDEO CLIPS:
Hidden History of March 8. 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKswBq4v3q4
Rev. Kenneth Glasgow’s Story http://youtu.be/7L_h2nVceJc 15 The city is as drained as it was fifty years ago. Maybe we could have had a survey before the march. and engaged local leadership to find ways to make things better now. What is the bucket list for Selma for next year? Some people have been at this for fifty years. They have discipline to be here every year. I’m glad I was here. I’m glad I lost my voice because that means I was doing something. - Aleta Alston-Toure, New Jim Crow Movement, Jacksonville FL
Being there helped me put things into better perspective. Most of the crowd consisted of children and parents carrying babies, holding toddlers’ hands. The crowd showed me that not all young adult, adults, and children are blind to history. That even as society, and the government tries to shield us from the truth, we as the new generation of soon-to-be-adults see what’s really going on in our country. The fact that racism still exists, and we as people of different backgrounds, families, cities or countries are not going to sit and let their minions run around us anymore. We are going to stand together. - Donshay Brown, Project South, Atlanta GA
Southern Movement Assembly Anchor Organizations that participated in the March 2015 Delegation to Selma, Alabama for the 50th Anniversary:
The Ordinary Peoples Society TOPS, Alabama Georgia Citizens’ Coalition on Hunger, Atlanta GA Project South, Atlanta & Regional Women Watch Afrika, Clarkston GA Alternate ROOTS, Regional Crescent City Media Group, New Orleans LA Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, Slidell LA & Regional Concerned Citizens for Justice, Chattanooga TN Spirithouse, Durham NC Black Workers for Justice, North Carolina New Jim Crow Movement, Jacksonville FL Southwest Workers Union, San Antonio TX National Council of Elders, South University Sin Fronteras, National Southern Movement Assembly www.southtosouth.org
Report Design & Layout: Stephanie Guilloud Timeline: Cita Cook Photo Credits: Jared Story, Jovan Julien, Joaquin Abrego