SELMA, Ala. — The small city where Kimbrough Ballard has lived for most of his adult life will be deluged Saturday with politicians, celebrities and tens of thousands of civil rights pilgrims.
“The whole world is going to be watching us,” said Ballard, who serves as the elected head of the Dallas County government here.
President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush will be at the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge. There were rumors that Oprah Winfrey will show up and that Lady Gaga will sing.
They are coming to rekindle the spirit of a city where, 50 years ago, nonviolent demonstrators endured billy clubs, cattle prods and clouds of tear gas as they protested for their right to vote.
Selma’s “Bloody Sunday,” a day of violence and courage, spurred passage of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most important achievements of the civil rights era.
“What happened in Selma is quintessentially an American experience,” Obama said last week at the White House.
“The civil rights movement … at its best” — that’s how Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., whose head was cracked open by state troopers on the bridge that day, describes it now.
Earlier this week, though, before the commemoration, Selma wasn’t so much a place of imagination and triumph as a poor Alabama city where more than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty and the unemployment rate is twice the state average.
It was a place struggling to overcome the racial divisions that have in many ways defined it for generations.
For Obama, the trip to Selma is a chance to tap into a place where the civil rights movement reached its apex. In the days after Bloody Sunday, more than 30,000 protesters from across the country — college students, pastors, businessmen and homemakers — converged on Selma.
“It reminds us that the history of America doesn’t belong to one group or another,” Obama said recently. “It belongs to us all.”
“Change some hearts”
The president will be making the trip with his wife and two daughters. There will also be at least 95 members of Congress in attendance — Republicans and Democrats.
None of the House Republican leadership had planned to go until late Friday, when Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California announced he would attend the anniversary events.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, one of the co-leaders of the congressional delegation with Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said he thinks the trip could help spur some Republicans to reconsider their positions on voting rights legislation.
“I hope we can help change some hearts here,” said Brown, who will be making the trip to Selma for the fourth time.
Scott, one of just two blacks in the Senate, had a more modest goal: “Hopefully we will form the bond of friendship.”
Obama recently met with some of the activists who were part of the voting rights battles in Selma in the 1960s. His message to them was that his presidency was their legacy.
“I wouldn’t be where I am if it was not for you,” he told them, according to senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.
Aides said the president has been writing portions of his Saturday speech himself, rather than leaving it to speechwriters. One of his goals is to link the spirit of the 1960s Selma protests to today’s battles over issues such as same-sex marriage, income inequality and immigration.
Jarrett said Obama wants to make the point that “we are all inextricably linked together, and it rests on everybody’s shoulders to create a country where that fair shot is possible for all.”
Much-needed jolt
For the past five decades, Bloody Sunday has been as much burden as blessing to Selma. Now Ballard and other elected officials are hoping that the world’s attention might provide their town with a much-needed jolt.
“Something very insignificant can happen here, and it will make national news, just because we’re Selma,” Ballard said.
When the all-white Selma Country Club initially rejected a Japanese businessman’s application in the early 1990s, it was national news. The club, in a county that is 80 percent black, does not have any black members, an omission that Ballard said has more to do with history than with current racial tension.
“I’m not a member of that club, but 99.99 percent of the people there are friends of mine,” he said. “It is a great organization run by a lot of great people.”
More recently, the city has been divided over whether to repair a monument honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who unsuccessfully defended Selma during the Civil War and later became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The monument, which sits on city property, was unveiled in 2000 and has been a target of vandals and a source of controversy ever since.
“There’s such a small segment of the population that even (cares about the monument),” Ballard said. “It isn’t important to anyone.”
Selma’s longest-lasting wound — and its biggest barrier to attracting outside industry — remains its schools, which have been effectively segregated since the early 1990s. A bitter fight over whether to renew the contract of the superintendent led the white population of the city to abandon the system en masse.
Today, the public schools in Selma are 99 percent black.
“The first thing my daughter said to me when she came home from school the first day was, ‘Where’s all the white people?’ ” said Selma Police Chief William Riley, who seven years ago moved to the city from Newport News, Va., to run the department.
Last year, his wife and daughter returned to Virginia so his daughter could attend middle school there.
Economic issues
Fifty years after Bloody Sunday, the brutal, institutionalized racism that outraged much of the country is gone from Selma, replaced with murkier problems that cannot be repaired by a brave stand on a bridge or a single sweeping piece of legislation.
On Tuesday, Ballard and Mayor George Evans taped a joint interview for a weekend segment of NBC’s “Today” show. The two elected officials — one black and one white — sat side by side on a courthouse bench. The interviewer, who had flown in from New York, asked them about any lingering racial divide in the city.
“I don’t see it,” Ballard said. “I’m elected to office in a population that is 80 percent African-American. I had very strong African-American opponents both times.”
Evans — who will be marching across the bridge with a group that includes Obama, Lewis and Robert Bentley, the state’s Republican governor — offered a similar assessment.
“Hearts change, minds change, people change,” he said. “I am proud of our city.”
The interview finished and Ballard headed back to his office in the county courthouse. He had arrived in Selma in 1967 to sell life, health and burial insurance door to door, mostly to black families.
“There was still a lot of tension, but I was too naive or too young to be worried much about it,” he said.
Eventually, those clients became his supporters when he ran for city and county office. In the past few years, as his tax base has dwindled, Ballard has cut his county maintenance staff from seven people to two, slashed the number of county cellphones and postponed road repairs to balance his budget.
“We got a black eye in 1965, and that followed us,” he said.
But Bloody Sunday has also brought some benefit to Selma, Ballard said.
The flood of visitors to see a sitting president and pay homage to a moment when right triumphed over wrong would probably add up to one of his best months for sales tax receipts in decades. “These days,” he said, “I live and die by that revenue.”
What happened
This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” On March 7, 1965, marchers were walking from Selma, Ala., to the state capital, Montgomery, to demand an end to discriminatory practices that robbed blacks of their right to vote.
The protesters were beaten, trampled and tear-gassed by police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. It took two more attempts for marchers to successfully complete their journey.
