Most of the Lafayettes’ first recruits were high school students. The threat of violence and retaliation was so strong that most African Americans were afraid to attend a mass meeting. Selma was home to Sheriff Jim Clark, a violent racist, and one of Alabama’s strongest white Citizens’ Councils-made up of the community’s white elite and dedicated to preserving segregation and white supremacy. ![]() Library of Congress.Īlthough many people are aware of the violent attacks during Bloody Sunday, white repression in Selma was systematic and long-standing. Alabama Governor George Wallace, holding photograph of “agitators” while speaking to Citizens’ Council group in Atlanta in 1963. White terrorism created a climate of fear that impeded organizing efforts. Ironically, in some Alabama counties, more than 100% of the eligible white population was registered. There were virtually no Blacks on the voting rolls in these rural counties that were roughly 80 percent Black. The situation was even worse in neighboring Wilcox and Lowndes counties. SNCC’s organizing was necessary and extremely challenging because African Americans in Selma, despite being a majority in the community, were systematically disfranchised by the white elite who used literacy tests, economic intimidation, and violence to maintain the status quo.Īccording to a 1961 Civil Rights Commission report, only 130 of 15,115 eligible Dallas County Blacks were registered to vote. The white power structure used economic, “legal,” and extra-legal means, including violence, to prevent African Americans from accessing their constitutional right to vote. The later nationally known movement was the product of more than two years of very careful, very slow work.” -Prathia Hall in Hands on the Freedom Plow(Read more of Hall’s account here.)ģ. “The 1965 Selma Movement could never have happened if SNCC hadn’t been there opening up Selma in 19. Prathia Hall, a SNCC field secretary who came to Selma in the fall of 1963, explained: Also read one by Bernard Lafayette in “ Selma: Diary of a Freedom Fighter” by James Forman in The Making of Black Revolutionaries.) Here is an April 6, 1963, report by Colia Lafayette. (Learn more about the day-to-day work of SNCC in Selma from field reports by Colia and Bernard Lafayette. Working with the Boyntons and other DCVL members, the Lafayettes held Citizenship School classes focused on the literacy test required for voter registration and canvassed door-to-door, encouraging African Americans to try to register to vote. In 1963, seasoned activists Colia (Liddell) and Bernard Lafayette came to Selma as field staff for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), known as “Snick.” Founded by the young people who initiated the 1960 sit-in movement, SNCC had moved into Deep South, majority-black communities doing the dangerous work of organizing with local residents around voter registration. Selma was one of the communities where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began organizing in the early 1960s. This case helped inspire the freedom rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1961.Ģ. Supreme Court case that ruled segregated facilities serving interstate travel-such as bus and train stations-unconstitutional. The Boyntons’ son Bruce Boynton, a Howard University law student, was the plaintiff in Boynton v. The DCVL became the base for a group of activists who pursued voting rights and economic independence. Amelia Boynton Robinson, her husband Samuel William Boynton, and other African American activists founded the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) in the 1930s. The Selma voting rights campaign started long before the modern Civil Rights Movement. World Telegram & Sun photo by Stanley Wolfson. A march of 15,000 in Harlem in solidarity with the Selma voting rights struggle. We owe it to students on this anniversary to share the history that can help equip them to carry on the struggle today. There is much they can learn from an accurate telling of the Selma (Dallas County) voting rights campaign and the larger Civil Rights Movement. ![]() Today, issues of racial equity and voting rights are front and center in the lives of young people. This version of history, emphasizing a top-down narrative and isolated events, reinforces the master narrative that civil rights activists describe as “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, and the white folks came south to save the day.” Martin Luther King Jr., the interracial marchers, and President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act. On this 50th anniversary year of the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act it helped inspire, national attention is centered on the iconic images of “Bloody Sunday,” the words of Dr. Also see a shorter version of this article Ten Things You Should Know About Selma Before You See the Film and a free downloadable lesson on Selma.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |