50 years after Selma, renew commitment to voting rights

At 2:30 P.M. Sunday, thousands of people will march across an iconic Alabama bridge named after a Confederate Army general and Ku Klux Klan grand dragon to celebrate a 50-year milestone for the advancement of civil rights in America.

That irony will not be lost on many of this weekend’s demonstrators who will remember that Bloody Sunday of March 7, 1965, when hundreds of mostly black marchers demanding their constitutional right to vote crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge only to be met with whacking billy clubs, noxious tear gas and lunging horses. At least 17 people were severely injured in the melee.

Widespread outrage over that brutality by Alabama state troopers galvanized the nation to draft and enact the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. It outlawed poll taxes and literacy tests that effectively blocked hundreds of thousands of African-Americans from the ballot box for decades.

MOVING BACKWARDS?

But as thousands celebrate that victory at this weekend’s Selma Jamboree, which today will include addresses by President Barack Obama and an appearance by former President George W. Bush, many also will take stock of apparent back slides in voting rights in particular and civil rights in general in recent years.

Some will point to ongoing efforts to dilute free and unfettered voting freedoms at state and federal levels; others will lament an upsurge in high-profile cases of police brutality against blacks in this nation, most visibly etched into our collective consciousness by last year’s killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and of Eric Garner in New York City at the hands of white police officers.

As for equal access to the polls, many rightly worry about an erosion in the rights afforded in President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, which was drafted, approved and signed into law a mere months after the horrific events of Bloody Sunday.

But in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court repealed portions of that act. In addition, more than a dozen states are changing laws to make it harder for minorities to vote. Other states, including Ohio, have tried but fortunately thus far have failed to turn the clock back five decades on free and open access to the polls.

CHALLENGES CAN BE MET

Clearly, racial polarization remains alive and well in this nation, and some of the noble ideals of the landmark 50-year-old march remain unfulfilled. Even in Selma, a city the same size as Niles in the Mahoning Valley, townsfolk still speak of lingering prejudices, and informal segregation of races endures.

Nonetheless, the monumental progress achieved over 50 years of universal black suffrage — up to and including the election and re-election of this nation’s first black president — illustrates that none of the remaining challenges should be insurmountable. They won’t be as long as Americans of all backgrounds work to embrace the letter and, more importantly, the spirit of the nation-altering Voting Rights Act of 1965.