Muslims For Kucinich

SELMA -- When Selma native Shannon Creagh thinks about Bloody Sunday in 1965, an event riddled with images of billy clubs, tear gas and high-flying emotions, one man comes to mind: her middle school principal, Tom Hrobowski.

In 1965 in Selma, several civil rights demonstrations were taking place at that time, but many blacks were afraid to attend them and risk being fired by white employers, said Creagh, 52.

Hrobowski, following this trend, did not allow his students to miss class to attend the demonstrations, Creagh said. But on March 7, 1965, a Sunday, Hrobowski showed up to watch the procession of 600 black marchers, including Creagh, headed east on U.S. 80 in Selma, en route to Montgomery. The marchers were battling for more voting rights for blacks, a process at that time blocked from many with poll taxes and tests.

Though just an onlooker, Hrobowski was targeted by a local lawman. When the man's horse kicked him, Creagh said, Hrobowski told him, "I'm not marching."

"You're a nigger, ain't you?" the officer replied.

Incensed with a new desire to fight for the rights of his people, Hrobowski began from that day on excusing students from class to attend civil rights demonstrations.

"He told the whole school to leave and march," Creagh said.

Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr. led a symbolic march over the bridge, and then secured protection for a full Selma-to-Montgomery march, under the constitution's protection of the right to petition. On March 21, 1965, about 3,200 marchers made the trip from Selma to Montgomery. Creagh, in ninth grade at the time, said she only walked as far as the Craig Air Force Base five miles away.

"You were never afraid at the events when Martin Luther King was there," Creagh said.

As Sunday's sun beamed down, Creagh, along with hundreds of others, gathered to kick off the 39th annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday and the Selma-to-Montgomery march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Black and white faces alike peered intently with wide eyes to hear speeches from community leaders, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham, and state Sen. Charles Steele, D-Tuscaloosa, that emphasized the turning point in voters' rights implemented by Bloody Sunday and the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Jackson said that when the voting rights and civil rights acts were established, America moved from a Jefferson democracy to a King democracy.

"In some ways, America began in Selma, Alabama," Jackson said before the march.

Steele, interim vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said the civil rights cause still needs to be dramatized.

Spirits rose as the parade participants marched, holding hands through the streets of downtown Selma, chanting and singing hymns in honor of those who walked the same streets almost 40 years before them.

Momentum peaked as the crowd, led by Jackson and other prominent figures, paused in silence as one man stepped out to say, "Listen, there is not going to be fighting. There will be no tear gas this go-around. Let's just walk." And so the crowd slowly crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge one more time, step by step, together.

'Back then, we couldn't do this'

After the walk over the bridge, participants gathered in the park at the foot of the bridge, where the SCLC/WOMEN Inc., led by founder and chairwoman Evelyn Lowery, unveiled a new monument in the park honoring U.S. Rep. John Robert Lewis, D-Ga., who with others led the march across the bridge and was hit in the head and knocked out cold by a state trooper's nightstick.

Lewis told the audience he and his colleagues didn't know what to expect that day.

"Six hundred of us made a decision to get in the way," he said.

Lewis, then head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said he brought a knapsack with two books, an apple, an orange, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and prepared to be taken to jail that day. Instead, he woke up after his fall safely among friends.

"I don't know how I got back there, but I did," he said.

Lewis recalled his anger at the persecution the marchers received at the hands of the local lawmen. He said the county sheriff encouraged all white males over 21 to be deputized in preparation for the demonstration.

"I don't understand it, how President [Lyndon B.] Johnson can send troops to Vietnam ... but can't send troops to protect people who want to vote," he said.

Chris Johnson of Selma said he has attended Bloody Sunday commemorations for the past nine years.

"I've come to celebrate what happened and thank God we are able to go to the polls and vote," Johnson said.

The marchers in 1965, he said, made it possible for him and other black people not only to vote, but also to hold public demonstrations without fear.

"This is history," Johnson said. "Back then, we couldn't do this."

An 'original marcher'

Among the hundreds of attendants, C.D. Hamilton's sign that read "Original Marcher" did not go unnoticed. Hamilton, then a student at Selma Theological Seminary and associate pastor at Selma First Baptist Church, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with the 600 on Bloody Sunday and again two days later with 30,000 to 40,000 others who joined the movement.

Hamilton said only 500 were allowed to continue marching from Selma through Lowndes County, where the four-lane roads narrowed to two lanes.

He said he gave up his rights to march with the smaller group to a man whose passion for the cause meant a lot to him.

"He was a one-legged white man who asked me for permission to march," Hamilton said. "I could not believe he wanted to hobble on the pavement all the way to Montgomery, and so I just could not tell him no."

Hamilton said a notable amount of white supporters traveled from all over the country to join in the march. Some people even came from overseas, he said.

On the other hand, Hamilton said he felt hostility from some whites. Johnson had ordered the Alabama National Guard to preside over the event and ensure that it function smoothly without resistance. Hamilton said they did not wear their feelings on their sleeve, but they wore them underneath their jackets.

"We called them the 'Nasty Guard,'" he said. "In their hearts, they did not want to be there protecting us. As Guardsmen, they were not allowed to show how they felt, but a few of them opened up their jackets to expose Confederate flags underneath."

Hamilton said he fought for change so his then-1-year-old son could attend college. He said with a victorious smile that his son later graduated with a degree in engineering from the University.

Toni Tate traveled to Selma from Kokomo, Ill., with about 100 others from Mount Pisgah Baptist Church to participate in the Bridge Crossing Jubilee. Tate said coming to Selma for the gathering was not only important symbolically, but as a way to teach the children the history they don't read in the classroom.

"They [children] didn't learn about Bloody Sunday and things that happened in Selma for them to get the right to vote," she said.

Stephen Ghee, 77, watched the original Bloody Sunday from across the Alabama River a few yards away from the bridge. He said state troopers were beating the marchers, pushing them back with horses and clubs.

"This new generation, they don't know what it [the civil rights movement] is all about," he said. "It hadn't hit them yet. You'd have to live through it."

'We have overcome'

Ghee said that before Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights Act, only about 300 blacks were registered to vote in Dallas County. Selma has changed dramatically since that day 39 years ago, he said.

"There's hope now," he said. "Black people across the country at that time didn't have the right to vote. They thought they did, but they didn't. They didn't have a candidate."

Ghee said the relationship between blacks and whites has improved as well.

"It's good," he said. "I've been here all my life, and I know blacks and whites. We get along very well."

Glover James Towner Jr., a retired teacher, has watched community attitudes change over the years from the front of Dallas County High School classrooms. He said he saw the impact of the Selma-to-Montgomery march firsthand as the gulf between blacks and whites in the school system has gradually grown smaller.

Like oil and water, students kept to their own race. He said the school system held separate proms for blacks and whites and provided separate school buses for members of the high school marching band. Towner also said state troopers monitored the halls of Dallas County High School to protect students from interracial fighting.

Though the races had been forced together by integration policies a decade before, Towner said animosity between blacks and whites dies hard in Selma. In fact, black boys still did not talk to white girls when he first took a teaching position in 1975, he said.

Towner was the first black driver's education teacher hired in Dallas County, and though a few other black teachers were hired before him, black and white faculty did not associate with each other, he said.

"When I first came here, things were rough," he said. "Compared to what happened 39 years ago, we have made progress as a people, but things are still not like they are supposed to be. Today is a great opportunity for blacks and whites to come together despite the racism that has divided them for decades."

While the crowd broke out in song to the tune of a harrowing gospel anthem "We Shall Overcome," Daisy McElroy of Montgomery patiently tended to the T-shirt display she had arranged in front of a shop next door to the rally. Though her hands were busy, McElroy's heart and soul were focused on the words of the song that resonated through the slow-paced streets of Selma.

She said it is a song that defines the spirit of the black community. McElroy, who said she makes a living by traveling around the state to set up flea markets, said she is proud of Alabama's blacks who have overcome obstacles to attain voting rights and equality.

"We shall overcome and, indeed, we have overcome a lot of things," she said.

Jesse Jackson urges crowd to vote

Speakers and participants throughout the day also stressed that the black community stands at another turning point in the upcoming presidential elections.

"Hands that once picked cotton will now pick a president," Jackson said. "We deserve a change, and we now have the power to make that change."

Jackson said 8.5 million blacks nationwide remain unregistered to vote. With such narrow margins in the last presidential election, Jackson said black voters can and do make the difference in elections, and he urged the crowd to vote and encourage others to vote.

"We can bring George Bush back to Alabama to finish his Guard duty," Jackson said.

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich addressed the crowd via cell phone. He referred to the 2000 presidential election, which Bush won by only a few hundred votes after a vote-counting crisis in Florida.

"We learned from Florida how voting rights is a continuing issue," Kucinich said. He said "eternal vigilance" would be the price to pay for needed monitoring and accountability in voting venues across the country.

"I'm dedicated to a nation that can truly live its dream as a nation for the people and by the people as evidenced in the ballot box," Kucinich said.

At the end of the rally, the crowd sang several songs, including a verse which rang, "Ain't gonna let Bush-whacker turn me 'round."

From the outside looking in

Alexa Wohlfort, a graduate student from Western Illinois University, attended Sunday's events in Selma as part of a sociology graduate project researching the events of the civil rights movement in Alabama.

"Being here doing hands-on research is the closest thing I will ever do to being in the shoes of the people who did this the first time," she said.

"This day has put a whole new perspective on history. You don't realize how strong it all was until you experience it."

Several other WIU students also attended the rally, as the campus theme for the year is social justice.

"I certainly have a newfound respect coming from a predominantly white community in Illinois," said Pfc. Blaine McCoy of WIU. "I realized our thick ignorance of racism, civil rights and history in general. To understand the political nature here and how strong it is still is almost shocking, but it is also wonderful."