Montgomery to Selma
Driving on Highway 80 while listening to reports and watching footage from the march from Selma to Montgomery was just the start to a very eventful day. As we discussed the fights for voting rights that took place in Alabama, Dr. Smith really put things into perspective for us by sharing what he was doing on March 7, 1965. It is easy to see pictures and displace events to make them seem longer ago but as Dr. Smith showed us-they really weren’t. Dr. Smith had graduated high school and was in the war amongst black soldiers who did not have the ability to vote. People are easily shipped off and expected to fight for their country when they cannot even partake fully in the democracy. Also the man we happened to meet in the museum at the Lowndes Interpretive Center really made me realize how recent these events occurred and how much apart of their lives they continue to be. He was so enthusiastic to talk with us and point himself out in the photograph of the first attempt of the march that was halted so brutally by a line of policemen who beat and tear-gased the marchers. That very same photograph is also in the Smithsonian. The video we watched in the museum was very touching especially the woman who was talking about the violence that persisted into the night after it erupted on the bridge. She recounts running from the police while a girl was hurt on the sidewalk and not being able to check on her out of terror from the police. The drastic violence and degree of chaos caused by the police was in response to many people peacefully walking and trying to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge. Although fueled with anger about voting rights, the protesters were just walking and not doing anything to provoke the events that cause the day to be remembered as Bloody Sunday.
The section of the museum we explored after the film is what affected me the most. The statue of a police officer with a gas mask on holding a nightstick was mortifying and I cannot even imagine approaching the bridge to see the “sea of blue” cops armed and ready for them. The most haunting part of the museum for me was what I read in the section dedicated to Tent City. A 17 year old girl went into labor with complications and eventually bled to death because she would have no hope being admitted to an all white hospital and the alternative was too far away. To read about such a young girl bleeding to death and trying to sympathize with her pain and fear is unreal. As I pointed the story out to Dr. Hattery she asked me to think about my own life and what I was doing at 17. The only things I worried about then were the SATs and getting into college. My biggest anxieties and stresses were over a test that which the scores are already meaningless. Our Reflection reading with the Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege” tied in nicely with the day to emphasize the injustice of several factors that I do not have to think about on a day to day basis but shape other people’s lives.
Walking around outside after the museum was a perfect way to actually process what I had just seen and relate it to other issues. Margaret and I discussed several of the problems we have been learning about the past few days and how it is affecting our group and how they affect our lives. To think about 4,000 people marching for 53 miles for a right I was just born with is astounding. I complain when I have to drive 53 miles let alone walk.