Selma Revisted - with video

Visiting Selma, Alabama was a brief, but memorable experience for me. This was the place that 42 years ago Alabama police brutally beat masses of people including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on their way to the polls to vote. Local "Jim Crow" laws prohibited Blacks from voting although it was their constitutional right. Known as "Bloody Sunday", that day was a glimpse or moment from a larger struggle where acts of liberation were met with overwhelming state violence. And still people continued forward. The Black and White racist system of limiting access to resources on this continent was implemented as economic policy starting in the 1680's and then instituted into public policy soon afterwards. After the freeing of slaves during the Civil War "Jim Crow" social control laws were passed. During all this time the forced labor of African Americans and other groups built wealth for a white power structure that police were charged to protect. Bloody Sunday is remembered as a "turning point" in the Civil Rights Movement, turning in a positive direction that is. Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the various efforts to apply those laws there have been change. There as also been the rise of the "Prison Industrial Complex" and the simultaneous encouragement and criminalization of drug crimes actions in low income communities of color by the US government. These are the newest incarnation of racial social control polices.

"Bloody Sunday" was a moment in time that has been repeated as people have tried to free themselves from unjust systems of dehumanization. In this instance it was to take back the right to vote. Violence and injustice are things that most of us have experienced and fear in one way or another. Taking action and facing that fear with others has usually skull crushing consequences, but possibly a large reward. Like Ghandi's raids on the Salt Mines of India, confronting fear showed that people's spirit and determination were greater than the weapons or violence used on them. What would it be like not to live in fear? I think that in taking on those figures of authority and facing that fear, they are in better position to answer that question.
With less fear, we are better able to imagine the world that we want and to build toward that vision. Without the fear of others, we'd be able to do much more together.

When Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton came to Selma to celebrate the Jubilee and remember "Bloody Sunday" it celebrated a worthy battle in 1965. It pushed against the white power structure and predictably that structure pushed back.

See the Houston Indy Media article on this.

Here is a video I took there at the school in Selma.





Stepping back somewhat and thinking beyond the US I know that more people have died in the Philippines under their current U.S. supported government than in all the 20 years of Ferdinand Marcos and his brutal enactment of Martial Law. Over 1000 people so far. And still there are people acting to change intolerable conditions, facing and living with fear of being disappeared every day. This is nothing new to many places in the world, especially ones that have governments friendlier to U.S. interests than to the prosperity and welfare of it's citizens. Isn't it time to think about the cost that fear takes on all of us? Clearly, acting in our own interests for a more human and thoughtful world will make it easier for others to do the same worldwide.