In Selma, 30 years later, the promise is most conspicuous in museum

National Catholic Reporter, March 31, 1995 by Chuck Fager, Alston Fitts, III

Revisiting Selma, Ala., 30 years after a march there led to passage of the Voting Rights Act, I found the early spring air as redolent of anxiety as nostalgia, with the aromas of paradox and poignancy thrown in for good measure. Only faintly did I catch the scent of hope.

One paradox came from watching the city's mayor, Joe Smitherman, handing keys to the city to John Lewis and Hosea Williams. Lewis and Williams led the ragtag columns that were attacked by Alabama state troopers on March 6, 1965, as marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge while the same Mayor Smitherman, then an avowed segregationist, watched from the other side of the swirling Alabama River.

The mayor's performance in both cases was no more than skilled politics: Smitherman now depends on black voters. The Selma campaign is now touted by the Chamber of Commerce as a major city "attraction," complete with a parade, beauty pageant, postcards, T-shirts, street festival and billboards -- the movement-become-tourist kitsch.

The poignancy emerged several days later when former Gov. George Wallace, now deaf and mute in his wheelchair, joined the re-created march near its conclusion in Montgomery. I was back home in Pennsylvania by then, but the echo of repentance by the man who cried, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," was touching and doubtless good for his soul, however irrelevant to the perils and politics of the present.

Although little noted by the media, who preferred the safe nostalgia, the perils of the present were much on the minds of the march veterans. Jesse Jackson was, as usual, more thoughtful and eloquent than he seems in sound bites.

At the anniversary rally, he pointed to ominous parallels between the situation of African-Americans in the South today and a century ago. In 1895, he told the crowd packed into the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, there were more than a dozen blacks in Congress from the region, the last heirs of the Reconstruction. But by 1901, all were gone as the electorate was bleached out. Jim Crow was made a sacred law, and agitation for change became a crime, all with federal connivance.

Today, Jackson went on, the districting plans that returned Southern blacks to Congress -- including, most notably, John Lewis from Newt Gingrich's state of Georgia -- are all under attack in federal courts, where Reaganite judges have shown much hostility. Added to that, he said, are full-throated crusades against affirmative action and congressional plans to cut welfare and other programs that benefit the poor.

Despite these cries of alarm, or because of them, I wanted to return to Selma with the sense that re-enacting the movement's high point might reignite the zeal for social reform, especially among the churches. But in truth, the crowds were rather small. Black leadership is divided and often undistinguished, and white allies now are few. I didn't see much that gave me hope that the forces aimed at robbing its achievement of meaning will soon be stopped or even slowed.

Instead, the most encouraging signs came elsewhere on my pilgrimage, in, of all places, museums. Selma has a small display of photographs of its voting rights campaign. But in two other cities, large blocks of public and private capital have been put into buildings in which the movement's story is preserved and told brilliantly and vividly.

In Birmingham's Civil Rights Institute, my son and I watched the introductory video, which ended with a stark image of segregated water fountains. Then the screen rose and the lights went up on the same two fountains, complete with "white" and "colored" signs. When we reached the panel of stained glass from the 16th Street Baptist Church where a bomb killed four little girls in August 1963, we turned a corner and faced a huge window that framed the church itself, right across the street.

In Memphis at the National Civil Rights Museum, we boarded a life-size city bus with a life-size image of Rosa Parks and were angrily told to move to the back or face arrest. Later we walked past a garbage truck from the 1968 sanitation workers strike, complete with garbage, and then stood in the rooms where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spent the last night of his life.

These museums were brilliantly done, but after revisiting Selma, they carried more than an aesthetic appeal for me. If the tide of reaction continues to wash across the South as Jackson and others fear, these museums will stand as testimony, as accusation. Along with the South's standard spring fragrances of magnolia and azalea blossoms, they exude the sustaining scents of memory and hope.