Fifty Years After Bloody Sunday in Selma, Everything and Nothing Has Changed

"Shania was not personally bullied, but older siblings of her friends were beat up and called “nigger lovers.” She couldn’t sleep over at her white friends’ houses, and nobody from her school would come to her birthday parties. Graffiti on the back of Walmart depicted Shania being lynched. “Nigger” it said, pointing to her head. “Hang the bitches,” it said below, next to “MLK is a homosexual” and a drawing of a swastika. Shania spent two unhappy years at Morgan before leaving for the public elementary school.

The group’s founder, Mark Duke, bought a grand Victorian mansion in an integrated neighborhood near downtown. After Shania enrolled at Morgan, vandals covered his house in toilet paper and spray-painted “Go Home” on his lawn. He received death threats, and an anti–Freedom Foundation website was started by white supremacists. The Department of Homeland Security came to investigate.

Old wounds have not healed in Selma, which was founded as a major slave-trading center. There are still rotting slave quarters in back alleys, and massive foundries that produced weapons for the Confederate Army still line the banks of the Alabama River. Every April, a month after the Bloody Sunday commemoration, hundreds come to town to re-enact the Battle of Selma, when Union troops burned the city to the ground. Some also pay respects to Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the KKK, whose memorial in the city’s moss-draped Confederate cemetery describes him as “one of the South’s finest heroes.”

Dallas County was the poorest in Alabama last year, with unemployment double the state and national average. More than 40 percent of families live below the poverty line. The violent crime rate is five times the state average.
There are nearly as many vacant buildings as occupied ones in the once picturesque downtown, and side streets are desolate."

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Fifty Years After Bloody Sunday in Selma, Everything and Nothing Has Changed | The Nation:

photo James Martin