Fifty Years After Bloody Sunday in Selma, Everything and Nothing Has Changed

[AthenaAwakened]

http://www.thenation.com/article/19...arch-selma-everything-and-nothing-has-changed

The statistics are staggering—Dallas County was the poorest in Alabama last year, with unemployment double the state and national average. More than 40 percent of families live below the poverty line. The violent crime rate is five times the state average. The Alabama Policy Institute named Selma the “least Business-Friendly City” in the state. Selma describes itself as the “Queen City of the Black Belt,” but The Birmingham News more aptly labeled the region, named the Black Belt because of its rich soil, as “Alabama’s Third World.” Ten thousand white residents have left Selma in the past three decades, leaving it 80 percent African-American. There are nearly as many vacant buildings as occupied ones in the once picturesque downtown, and side streets are desolate.

Blacks now control Selma politically, but long-standing racial disparities persist. The west side, where most whites live, has tall pines, manicured lawns and the city’s only country club, which remains all-white. Despite Selma’s stark poverty, girls were playing tennis and the parking lot was filled with Escalades on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Old wounds have not healed in Selma, which was founded as a major slave-trading center. There are still rotting slave quarters in back alleys, and massive foundries that produced weapons for the Confederate Army still line the banks of the Alabama River. Every April, a month after the Bloody Sunday commemoration, hundreds come to town to re-enact the Battle of Selma, when Union troops burned the city to the ground. Some also pay respects to Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the KKK, whose memorial in the city’s moss-draped Confederate cemetery describes him as “one of the South’s finest heroes.”

Selma remains defined by its past, whether it be 1865 or 1965. Too many people visit the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a Confederate general who led the Alabama Klan) and the voting-rights museum across the street but never dig any deeper. “We have to move beyond the bridge,” Sewell said at Brown Chapel. “It’s not just about one commemoration on one day. We have to live Selma.” The historical focus on Bloody Sunday—as important as it is—has too often obscured the many problems facing the city today. “Selma has done a lot more for the rest of the world than it has done for itself,” the city’s first black mayor, James Perkins, often says.

In Selma, it feels like everything and nothing has changed.

 

[Derec]

Everything and nothing?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Selma on the surface has changed. Selma underneath that surface has not.

Grown people get this. Your mileage may vary.

 

[dismal]

I agree with everything you said and nothing you said there.

 

[Axulus]

Selma on the surface has changed. Selma underneath that surface has not.

Grown people get this. Your mileage may vary.

And what are these features "underneath the surface"? Can you provide a list?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Selma on the surface has changed. Selma underneath that surface has not.

Grown people get this. Your mileage may vary.

And what are these features "underneath the surface"? Can you provide a list?

Only if she had provided a link would this question have been avoided.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

And what are these features "underneath the surface"? Can you provide a list?

Only if she had provided a link would this question have been avoided.

oh look! At the top of the OP!

What could that be?

It looks like a LINK.

Now people still do have to read it. I can't take an axe and chop a person's head open and lay the information up in there.

I guess I could try though.

Any volunteers?

 

[Keith&Co.]

Now people still do have to read it. I can't take an axe and chop a person's head open and lay the information up in there.

I'd think a bricklayer's trowel and a funnel would be sufficient...

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Only if she had provided a link would this question have been avoided.

oh look! At the top of the OP!

What could that be?

It looks like a LINK.

Now people still do have to read it. I can't take an axe and chop a person's head open and lay the information up in there.

I guess I could try though.

Any volunteers?

It'll just be another article about how everything isn't perfect, why there is still poverty, drugs, unfair judicial outcomes, blah blah blah. Look, we said we were sorry in the late 60s. Isn't that enough? Doesn't that wipe all the errors of the past away?

We committed massive acts of genocide against the Native Americans and you don't hear them complaining. Maybe you guys should open a casino.

<-- Just to make the sarcasm clear.

 

[thebeave]

oh look! At the top of the OP!

What could that be?

It looks like a LINK.

Now people still do have to read it. I can't take an axe and chop a person's head open and lay the information up in there.

I guess I could try though.

Any volunteers?

It'll just be another article about how everything isn't perfect, why there is still poverty, drugs, unfair judicial outcomes, blah blah blah. Look, we said we were sorry in the late 60s. Isn't that enough? Doesn't that wipe all the errors of the past away?

We committed massive acts of genocide against the Native Americans and you don't hear them complaining. Maybe you guys should open a casino.

<-- Just to make the sarcasm clear.

Yep. Every MLK Jr day, I read the same old recycled editorial in my newspaper. Something about how we've come a long way since the '50's and '60's, but we're "not there yet" (as if that magic day will ever come when all people behave ). Followed by a few samples of the year's racially tinged events. i suspect I will still be reading that same editorial in the year 2525. Only the George Zimmermans of the future will be stalking the Trayvon Martins in their hovertrucks.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yep. Every MLK Jr day, I read the same old recycled editorial in my newspaper. Something about how we've come a long way since the '50's and '60's, but we're "not there yet" (as if that magic day will ever come when all people behave ). Followed by a few samples of the year's racially tinged events. i suspect I will still be reading that same editorial in the year 2525. Only the George Zimmermans of the future will be stalking the Trayvon Martins in their hovertrucks.

The issue is that there are so many out there blaming blacks for their troubles. They seem to think that it has been 10000 years since Selma, and all should be equal now. It took my immigrant family four generations to get a whole generational slate to graduate college. Only been two generations since Selma... and there are still a bunch of grumpy white folks that seem to think all should be good because we don't openly discriminate anymore.

 

[Derec]

Look, we said we were sorry in the late 60s. Isn't that enough? Doesn't that wipe all the errors of the past away?

Most of us weren't even born in the late 60s, much less responsible for anything for which we would need to apologize.

We committed massive acts of genocide against the Native Americans and you don't hear them complaining.

No, we didn't. You are committing the common faux-liberal fallacy of equating acts done by some white people with collective guilt shared by all white people. Of course, such racist collective blame is only applied to whites.

Also they aren't really "native". They came from Siberia. "Siberian-American" would be more accurate.

Maybe you guys should open a casino.

Monopoly casinos are a bad idea.
Maybe we should treat people equally before the law without regard to their race. That means no race-based so-called "affirmative action", no reservations and no race-based monopolies or tax exemptions either.

<-- Just to make the sarcasm clear.

I think you are being sarcastic about the wrong thing.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Most of us weren't even born in the late 60s, much less responsible for anything for which we would need to apologize.

We committed massive acts of genocide against the Native Americans and you don't hear them complaining.

No, we didn't. You are committing the common faux-liberal fallacy of equating acts done by some white people with collective guilt shared by all white people. Of course, such racist collective blame is only applied to whites.

Also they aren't really "native". They came from Siberia. "Siberian-American" would be more accurate.

Maybe you guys should open a casino.

Monopoly casinos are a bad idea.
Maybe we should treat people equally before the law without regard to their race. That means no race-based so-called "affirmative action", no reservations and no race-based monopolies or tax exemptions either.

<-- Just to make the sarcasm clear.

I think you are being sarcastic about the wrong thing.

I think you didn't get a single point.

 

[Derec]

The issue is that there are so many out there blaming blacks for their troubles.

If say Michael Brown robs a convenience store and assaults a police officer he is responsible for his triubles. Not some white person and certainly not white people collectively.
The Left wants to blame white people for black people's troubles.

They seem to think that it has been 10000 years since Selma, and all should be equal now. It took my immigrant family four generations to get a whole generational slate to graduate college. Only been two generations since Selma... and there are still a bunch of grumpy white folks that seem to think all should be good because we don't openly discriminate anymore.

There is still white racism against blacks. There is also black racism against whites, as well as many other permutations. Two generations is plenty.

- - - Updated - - -

I think you didn't get a single point.

I got your single point ("white people are bad, mkay") and have pointed out the reason your point is fallacious.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If say Michael Brown robs a convenience store and assaults a police officer he is responsible for his triubles. Not some white person and certainly not white people collectively.
The Left wants to blame white people for black people's troubles.

Michael Brown was a person, not a people. Care to keep this on topic?

They seem to think that it has been 10000 years since Selma, and all should be equal now. It took my immigrant family four generations to get a whole generational slate to graduate college. Only been two generations since Selma... and there are still a bunch of grumpy white folks that seem to think all should be good because we don't openly discriminate anymore.

There is still white racism against blacks. There is also black racism against whites, as well as many other permutations.

Yes... very important to keep harping over black racism of whites. That shit has held the white man back in Corporate and Collegiate Institutions for too long!

- - - Updated - - -

I think you didn't get a single point.

I got your single point ("white people are bad, mkay") and have pointed out the reason your point is fallacious.

Whatever Shrek.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Beave, you have a to-do list, for the year 2525? What's your secret? (Rapture doesn't count.)

 

[AthenaAwakened]

OK, we are in a thread about Selma Alabama and so far the discussion has been about everything from Michael Brown, a young black man killed in another state, and the Rapture. Just out of curiosity, has anyone actually read the article in the OP?

 

[scombrid]

What I understand from certain participants in these threads.

The racist white man is not all white men so white people in general should not be made to feel guilty for the effects of racism or past racist policies by white governments.

But the black man that assaults a cop is "black people" therefore cops are justified when they kill an unarmed black suspect because black people are more dangerous to cops. Black people are responsible for all their own trouble.

 

[thebeave]

Beave, you have a to-do list, for the year 2525? What's your secret? (Rapture doesn't count.)

I'm going to have my head frozen, like Ted Williams and Walt Disney did. I will have it revived every hundred years or so, then read the internet to learn about the world situation. If its like Mad Max, I will get refrozen for another hundred years. If its all unicorns and rainbows, I will get my new body.