Southron
03-08-2015, 07:56 AM
In preparation for the weekend's goings-on, Selma city workers put up barricades downtown, outside Carter Drug.
In the 1960s, the drugstore served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement because its soda counter would not serve black customers. As the workers set up metal railings for crowd control, a white-haired former city councilman, Glenn Sexton, stepped from the drugstore and surveyed the scene from the sidewalk.
The outside world — presidents, civil rights legends, celebrities and tens of thousands of visitors — would arrive shortly to remember the civil rights marchers who were tear-gassed and beaten 50 years ago this weekend, by club-wielding officers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, just to Sexton's right.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge
In 2000, during his time on the City Council, Sexton and two other council members used city funds to help pay for a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
"It's going to be nothing but a ****** street party," Sexton said, using an epithet still heard on the streets here. He went on to describe participants in the march — both the one in 1965 and a reenactment this Sunday — with a torrent of vulgarities.
Selma today is a strange and complex place, difficult for even other native Alabamans to understand; a white passerby overhearing Sexton's rant dropped his head and walked on. Half a century after the civil rights movement made it famous, the city's extremes have become entrenched, as separate and unmoving as the banks of the Alabama River that runs through its heart.
And while people on the extremes stay at war, the majority in this city of about 20,000 residents are suffering. Dallas County ranked as the poorest in the state last year, with unemployment at 10.2%. Forty percent of families in Selma live below the poverty line, and violent crime is five times that in other towns around Alabama.
The town's infrastructure is crumbling, literally. Workers tried this week to paint and cover broken-down buildings, but the blight is pervasive. The house once owned by now-centenarian activist Amelia Boynton Robinson — the place where organizers planned the original march — is boarded up.
White residents have fled the city. Selma, evenly divided in 1965, is now 80% black, and housing projects crop up where cotton mills once sat. Selma's white residents live in an ever-shrinking quarter where antique churches are immaculately preserved and Spanish moss drapes from magnolia trees.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-selma-20150307-story.html#page=1
In the 1960s, the drugstore served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement because its soda counter would not serve black customers. As the workers set up metal railings for crowd control, a white-haired former city councilman, Glenn Sexton, stepped from the drugstore and surveyed the scene from the sidewalk.
The outside world — presidents, civil rights legends, celebrities and tens of thousands of visitors — would arrive shortly to remember the civil rights marchers who were tear-gassed and beaten 50 years ago this weekend, by club-wielding officers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, just to Sexton's right.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge
In 2000, during his time on the City Council, Sexton and two other council members used city funds to help pay for a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
"It's going to be nothing but a ****** street party," Sexton said, using an epithet still heard on the streets here. He went on to describe participants in the march — both the one in 1965 and a reenactment this Sunday — with a torrent of vulgarities.
Selma today is a strange and complex place, difficult for even other native Alabamans to understand; a white passerby overhearing Sexton's rant dropped his head and walked on. Half a century after the civil rights movement made it famous, the city's extremes have become entrenched, as separate and unmoving as the banks of the Alabama River that runs through its heart.
And while people on the extremes stay at war, the majority in this city of about 20,000 residents are suffering. Dallas County ranked as the poorest in the state last year, with unemployment at 10.2%. Forty percent of families in Selma live below the poverty line, and violent crime is five times that in other towns around Alabama.
The town's infrastructure is crumbling, literally. Workers tried this week to paint and cover broken-down buildings, but the blight is pervasive. The house once owned by now-centenarian activist Amelia Boynton Robinson — the place where organizers planned the original march — is boarded up.
White residents have fled the city. Selma, evenly divided in 1965, is now 80% black, and housing projects crop up where cotton mills once sat. Selma's white residents live in an ever-shrinking quarter where antique churches are immaculately preserved and Spanish moss drapes from magnolia trees.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-selma-20150307-story.html#page=1