Obama gets the most attention, but Clinton still gets her props
The T-shirts cost $10 and King was selling them like hotcakes.
He and his wife, Carolyn Doyle, first saw Obama a week ago in Cleveland where the couple live. But they weren't just in town for the political road show that brought Democratic front-runners Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to speak to separate churches.
Doyle is the daughter of Ernest Doyle, Selma's first black city councilman. The couple come back every year for the events honoring the 1965 clash at the Edmund Pettus Bridge that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
In between selling T-shirts and handing out change, King talked about what it was like for his father-in-law during his bid to hang on to a seat he essentially won by default. Only about 2 percent of the registered voters were black. Doyle managed to sneak into office when his white opponent dropped dead -- leaving him unchallenged for the council seat.
When Doyle's re-election came up, he fell under the weight of free chicken and fish dinners doled out by his white opponent.
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At the entrance of the Voting Rights Museum & Institute on Water Street is a wall of Post-its with handwritten notes and recollections scribbled by participants in the original march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, on what is known as "Bloody Sunday." There were only about 300 protesters involved in the nonviolent march, but they were met by about 200 uniformed police officers armed with billy clubs and tear gas.
"We slipped off the farm because the white owner didn't want us to march. We walked from Boykin to Selma to participate in the Selma-to-Montgomery," wrote Evelyn Ranch on Aug. 25, 1997.
"It was the worse day of my life, i did not believe America could ever be saved. . . . I saw grown men on horseback wielding Billy clubs the size of baseball bats and splitting the heads of women and children like they were watermelons," wrote protester J.L. Chestnut in a foreword to a Souvenir History Book distributed during the "Beloved Community Unity Breakfast," where Obama spoke Sunday morning.
Today, young black men are routinely killed by other young black men.
Forty-two years ago, the biggest threat to young black men, especially in the South, were mobs of white police or citizens. A photograph of one such youth is prominently displayed in the museum.
On Feb. 27, 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and killed by Alabama State Troopers during a night march. When troopers charged the crowd, the 27-year-old Jackson used his body to shield his mother. His death led activists to organize the Selma-to-Montgomery March.
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Turns out, Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't really need Bill.
Just as some Obama supporters evoked the image of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during Obama's visit to Brown Chapel AME Church, the Rev. Al Sharpton gave Hillary Rodham Clinton similar props.
At the rally before the symbolic march across the Pettus bridge Sunday, Sharpton -- the quintessential race politician -- compared the former first lady's commitment to the civil rights movement to that of Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit who was killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan March 7, 1965.
Liuzzo, a mother of five, was so moved by the images of police attacking civil rights marchers that she drove from Detroit to Selma to assist the marchers by transporting them back and forth between Montgomery and Selma.
Even today, the trek down U.S. 80 to Selma at night is an intimidating ride. Highway 14 -- a two-lane road -- is even more threatening. It winds past areas so isolated, the fenced-in cattle graze a feet from the shoulder of the road.
Liuzzo was killed on such a lonely stretch, when a carload of Klansmen pulled alongside her car and shot her in the head.
I'm not sure what Sharpton was up to. And despite the fact his remarks were calculated to stroke Clinton and rattle Obama, it was a fitting tribute to Liuzzo, an often overlooked figure of the civil rights movement.