If Selma taught us anything, it’s that our work is never done.
– President Barack Obama at Selma, Ala., March 7, 2015
Last weekend’s 50th anniversary celebration and renewal of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches is not normally in the Chronicle‘s local coverage wheelhouse, but it’s important not to let the historical moment pass without some acknowledgment – made even more pressing by a relentless news cycle that already threatens to obscure those events. I was tempted simply to republish President Obama’s Saturday speech in full – it’s certainly more eloquent than anything I’ll manage to say here. “It was not a clash of armies,” he said of “Bloody Sunday,” “but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the true meaning of America.”
The most important thrust of the president’s speech is that our work, indeed, on civil rights and racial equality is far from complete, and that the generations following have a responsibility to carry on and perfect that struggle. Not necessarily by a reprise of those same historic marches – although public ceremonies of protest and defiance continue to have their important place – but certainly, for prime example, in political pressure to restore the voting rights of poor and minority voters that have been under assault for a couple of decades.
“Meanwhile, the Voting Rights Act, the culmination of so much blood, so much sweat and tears, the product of so much sacrifice in the face of wanton violence, the Voting Rights Act stands weakened, its future subject to political rancor.”
Obama was referring to laws, like those in Texas, that have undermined both the rights and (through gerrymandering) power of minority voters, and more specifically to the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Shelby County v. Holder) to end federal preclearance of state voting laws in historically discriminatory jurisdictions (mostly in the South) – precisely the sort of laws and redistricting practices that have greatly aided a Republican majority to unfairly dominate the Texas Capitol.
The Work Unfinished
“One hundred members of Congress have come here today to honor people who were willing to die for the right to protect [voting rights],” Obama continued. “If we want to honor this day, let that hundred go back to Washington and gather 400 more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore that law this year. That’s how we honor those on this bridge.” It’s a worthy ambition, but there’s very little likelihood that this GOP-dominated Congress – which owes a large part of that domination (e.g., in Texas) to discriminatory voting laws and especially radical redistricting – will ever act to undo that discrimination.
Last week, state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, filed an omnibus bill (SB 990) that would take steps to ensure and protect voting rights: outlawing deceptive practices, allowing same-day registration and youth pre-registration, and making election day a state holiday, among other things. All these changes would certainly be progress. But it’s a mark of Ellis’ legislative realism as well as the existing Capitol imbalance of power that they would do so little to strike at the heart of racial political discrimination – primarily the radical redistricting that has “packed-and-cracked” minority voters into and out of racially monolithic legislative districts.
As Obama noted, one form of historical blindness is to insist that “nothing has changed,” when in fact because of the civil rights struggle, institutional racism is “no longer endemic. It’s no longer sanctioned by law or by custom.” But the greater mistake, he emphasized, is to pretend “that racism is banished; that the work that drew men and women to Selma is now complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the ‘race card’ for their own purposes.” One need look no further than the right-wing coverage of last weekend’s events to see that deception in action.
Paying Our Debt
After introducing SB 990 last week, Ellis wrote: “We must honor and fulfill the sacrifice of the men and women of our past, those who paved the way for generations to live the promise of this state and nation. Steps backward dishonor their memory and ignore the blood and tears shed in the pursuit of liberty.” But Ellis acknowledged that passing even this limited bill, in this Legislature, will be an “uphill battle.”
What is not uphill is something else Obama emphasized in Selma: “What’s our excuse today for not voting?” he asked. “How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought?” When I hear people, especially young people, cynically dismiss voting as pointless or insufficiently “radical,” or because “politicians are all the same” – I think of those marchers at Selma, and Montgomery, and Cicero, and Austin, and elsewhere, and the long line of predecessors stretching back through the various justice movements and before them, through the suffragists, through the bloodied enders of slavery, the thousands upon thousands of people who literally gave their lives to establish representative democracy – and not only the right, but the sacred responsibility, of the vote.
Recalled the president: “What a glorious thing, Dr. King might say. And what a solemn debt we owe.”
This article appears in March 13 • 2015.
