It seemed altogether appropriate to honor the 50th anniversary of the march in Alabama that was, ultimately, ill-fated, erupting in brutal police violence against peaceful protesters trying to secure their right to vote.
The marchers were trying to cross the Edmund Petus Bridge in the small town of Selma, Alabama, when the police warned them to halt.
What happened next shocked the world, and the images of official, state-sanctioned racism and intolerance underscored just how dangerous the process of desegregation and ending Jim Crow racism would very well be, particularly in the Deep South.
Resistance was indeed fierce, although the images and news stories made it to the national news and horrified viewers. Ultimately, it helped to justify the sense of urgency that the marchers were attempting to convey to the world, and that change was necessary.
While official Jim Crow segregationist laws had been officially abolished the year before by the flick of a pen by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the events at Selma instigated further action, as well as general sympathy for the cause of greater equality and the fight against racism.
It is a fight that we likely cannot say that we won, since racism has existed and, in many ways, become even more entrenched since. I suspect that the United States has less healthy lingering resentments in regards to racism and it's legacy.
There were countries with more extreme examples of state-sanctioned racism, such as Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. However, Nazi Germany was seen as a rogue state and bombed to rubble, and the Nuremberg Trials helped to convey the seriousness of the crimes of racial hatred. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission helped that country come to grips with the recent, state sanctioned racial tensions that the country was trying to move past.
Nothing of the sort happened here in the United States, and I suspect that this allowed many to kind of get off the hook fairly freely. It might have been healthier to hold more people accountable of their crimes, even socially (if not by doing jail time).
I am not trying to draw comparisons with Nazi Germany or even apartheid South Africa, but just making the point that the systematic employment of violence that constituted crimes was actually addressed in those two countries in a way that it never was here in the United States, and that we may have benefited from something like this.
In any case, I just wanted to honor such a significant and memorable event, as many leaders gathered at the site today to pay their respects and remember these events.
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