Selma-to-Montgomery March No Celebration of the Right to Vote This Year

Protesters Came to Continue the Struggle in the Face of Republican Attacks on Human Rights

The Rev. Al Sharpton addresses the crowd gathered for the main rally at the old Alabama Capitol

by Glynn Wilson

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — There was not supposed to be a major anniversary march this year to commemorate Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965. It is only the 47th anniversary of that groundbreaking event in civil rights and American political history that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act that year. Plans are in the works for a big event on the 50th anniversary in 2015.

But even though black voters, union leaders, women and Hispanic groups were all heartened by the election of the first African-American president in U.S. history in 2008, that has not stopped an all out assault on voting rights, labor rights, immigrant rights and yes, human rights, by Republican politicians across the country. So organizers decided the crisis was so great this year, especially in Alabama, that they had better get together and do a march this year.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who ended up leading much of the march and many of the rallies, including delivering the keynote speech at the final rally on the old Alabama Capitol steps Friday, explained what happened on Wednesday night before introducing the Secretary of Labor to the crowd in White Hall between Selma and Montgomery.

“We were in a board meeting of the National Action Network when Rose Sanders called and said, ‘reverend, we need to do something around voter ID and immigration.’

“I said, ‘definitely, we want to do whatever’ (we can),” he said. “She said ‘if y’all will do something on the Voting Rights Act, we’ll do the rest. Labor’s going to step up’. I said yes.”

The crisis this year is born of the frontal assault by corporate and Christian Republicans from the halls of Congress to the State House in Alabama who have gotten elected in a tea party bash over the past couple of years that threatens to take the country back decades if not more than a century to policies that were in place during the War Between the States.

People in this country thought we won that war when Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at the McLean House in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. But it took another 100 years for the slaves freed by President Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation to be assured the right to vote by federal law.

Now, 47 years later, there are forces in this country still aligned with that old Confederate coalition that would take us all back to that other time, a time when the privileged few, the 1%, get to tell everybody else, the 99%, they must live in relative poverty for the sake of the corporation, the church and the state all wrapped up into one institution resembling the monarchies of Europe many settlers came here to escape.

The behind the scenes leaders who want to exploit the ignorance of the people for their economic and political purposes are no longer cotton plantain owners. They are multinational corporations like BP and the Republican politicians they have bought and paid for who would use the law to suppress voting rights, to bring back the convict lease system and discriminate against American workers whether they are immigrants or unionized or not.

“We are just not celebrating the right to vote as we quite often do when we march,” Alabama Senator Hank Sanders explained to the crowd at the other First Baptist Church of Selma on Tuesday night. “This time we are marching to beat the challenges that face us. We are marching because they are attacking our voting rights. We are marching because they are attacking workers’ rights. They are attacking immigrants and women. They are attacking public education.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson acknowledged the role played by Senator Sanders and his wife Rose in keeping the Civil Rights Movement alive in Alabama.

“Though we had all of the trauma around Selma 47 years ago, most of those who marched who were not from here never came back. Others who stayed did not organize and institutionalize the impact of that day,” he said. “If not for Hank and Rose Sanders, we would not be here tonight.”

So thousands of people from across the state and the country marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma one more time on Sunday (see a photo essay and video here). Then they followed Highway 80 to Montgomery, stopping along the way to acknowledge key places on the Selma to Montgomery National Historic (Civil Rights) Trail.

Watch the video of Jesse Jackson’s speech here.

At night, many of them slept on cots in the New Macedonia Miracle Kingdom Worship Center on Selma Highway, including the Rev. Sharpton himself. There they were fed breakfast and dinner and kept up with constant changes to the schedule as organizers brought in more and more speakers as the week went along.

On Wednesday, the marchers stopped at a church by a cow pasture in Dallas Country and were fed by union workers wearing red AFL-CIO golf shirts, some of them from the United Steel Workers and others from the American Federation of Teachers. (You can see photos of this stop in this YouTube photo slide show).

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton marched the entire route and attended every night rally, while others came and went in the shuttle vans and buses going back and forth between Montgomery and Selma.

Camp Gunter Hill

By Monday afternoon, I found the perfect campground to navigate coverage of the events — and to use for future watchdog journalism assaults on Montgomery. While most of the campgrounds around Montgomery are nothing more than RV parking lots, there is a little known Corps of Engineers campground on County Road 7 called Gunter Hill Campground. From now on, to borrow a little historical language from the Civil War days, this place will be referred to in news story datelines as Camp Gunter Hill.

While I was chasing the news down from Selma to Montgomery and publishing as many photos and videos of the marches and rallies as time and the Internet connection speed would allow, I tried to find the time and space to reflect a little on the past 47 years. I will have more to say on that in an opinion column that will follow this news feature. For now I will just say the weather was fine for marching all week, until about 3:30 on Thursday night — on the morning of the big final march to go up Dexter Avenue to the old State Capitol in Montgomery — when the wind began to blow and it started to rain.

So by the time dedicated marchers arrived at their final destination this time, their ranks were thinned by the cold, wet weather.

Arriving at the Capitol

Glynn Wilson

The crowd of thousands arrived at the old Alabama Capitol after a weeklong march

But several thousand still showed up for the rally at 11:30 a.m on Friday, and the rain stopped just in time. Speaker after speaker got up in front of the podium on those marble steps where Jefferson Davis stood when he declared sucession form the union in 1861. They talked about the need to protect voting rights, workers’ rights, immigrant rights and women’s rights on the same steps utilized by George Wallace when he put up the final defensive ramparts to civil rights in the early 1960s.

They stood on the same hallowed ground where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood when he declared victory on the successful march from Selma to Montgomery on March 25, 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the act in Congress on March 17, one day after the second march started in Selma. The bill passed the Senate on May 26, one day after the rally in Montgomery.

Sharpton, who also hosts a news talk show on MSNBC called Politics Nation, which covered the events each day (you can still see that coverage online, see below), took to the microphone on those same steps and proceeded to “straighten out several lies and distortions” in the public dialogue put out by Republicans on their mission to take the country backwards and defeat President Barack Obama in his reelection bid later this year.

Targeting Voter ID Laws

At the top of the list came voter ID laws intended to suppress the votes of demographic groups that tend to vote for Democrats, including blacks, immigrants, women, old and young people, including U.S. soldiers and college students. The Republicans claim official state IDs are required to prevent voter fraud.

But according to Sharpton, “the only voter fraud that we can find is the statement that there is widespread voter fraud.”

At least 31 states have proposed changes to voter ID requirements to go into effect by election day in November 2012, even though a valid ID is already required by the law in most places. In Alabama, the law was changed in 2003 and allowed voters to use any valid form of identification, including drivers licenses, passports, even student IDs from college, birth certificates or utility bills.

But the Supermajority Republicans in the Alabama Legislature are trying to change the law again in 2012 to require an official state ID only, even though only three cases of voter fraud have been discovered and none of them had anything to do with showing identification at a polling place.

“The fraud is the use of non-existent widespread voter fraud to try and suppress and stop people from voting,” Sharpton said.

On his show he confronted one of the legislators who sponsored the bill (see video clips below), and on the capitol steps he said, “You are not trying to stop voter ID fraud. You are trying to identify who you want to vote. And we are not going to allow you to do it.”

Anti-Immigration Laws

Another lie being put forward by Republicans, according to Sharpton, involves the distorted debate that is leading some states to inact “inhumane” anti-immigration laws, telling people that Latinos took their jobs. They are forcing police to illegally profile Hispanics, blacks and others, he said.

“It’s one thing to say we can’t open the borders. But it’s another thing to tell people you can’t care for those who are sick, you can’t minister to those who need help,” Sharpton said. “The laws in Alabama are not immigration laws. They are Jim Crow laws.”

While many average working people in places like Alabama fell for the anti-immigrant rhetoric used by Republicans in the last election cycle, since the law went into effect here it has been shown by independent studies that not one single job was created by the law. All it did was hurt farmers and the economy and run off potential industries looking to locate in Alabama that would have provided jobs for the people here.

“We are not each others’ competition, each others’ adversary,” Sharpton said. “If we lock arms like we did coming down Highway 80 and cooperate rather than compete we can make America work for everybody. We’re telling you just like 47 years ago. Our fathers stood on these steps and fought for our right to vote. We stand with the community to say ‘you will repeal these immigration laws’.”

Right to Work Means Right Not to Work

Another lie, Sharpton pointed how, was how the Republicans like to talk about “right to work states, where you don’t have the ability to organize unions.”

“It’s the right not to work law,” Sharpton said. “It’s to work without pensions. It’s to work without having due process. It’s to work without having collective bargaining. It’s to give us to the mercy of the employer. We stand with labor because we are the laborers. It’s not about unions using us. We use unions to protect ourselves. We are labor.”

Why They Marched

Glynn Wilson

The Rev. Al Sharpton leading the march on Wednesday, the day set aside to focus on labor rights under attack

When asked why they marched this time, Sharpton said it was not a celebration of the past. Although on this trip, he found out his ancestors from Dothan, Alabama voted here in the late 1800s, but were disenfranchised by poll taxes and other discriminatory laws after that. And he recently found out he was a descendant of slaves owned by the family of long-time South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.

“We didn’t come to commemorate what happened 47 years ago,” Sharpton said to the large crowd of people at the foot of the steps and the television cameras rolling from their riser in the middle of it all. “We came to continue what happened 47 years ago. We praise and love those who paid the price 47 years ago. But the best compliment to them is to continue to fight right now.”

To the Republicans, Sharpton said, “You can’t dedicate a statue to Dr. King in Washington and then go to 31 states and revoke the voting rights bill he put on the books. You are trying to give us a symbol with no substance.”

Sharpton said his non-profit organization, labor unions and other groups are using the Selma-to-Montgomery march as a jumping off point to go all over the county to challenge legislatures, laws in the courts and to prepare people in the churches to stand up for President Obama in 2012.

“We are not going to allow you to steal this election,” Sharpton said. “We saw the hanging chads in Florida. Now you are trying to come with another scheme of ID? We are smarter than that. We are wiser than that. We are ready for you. We didn’t come this far to get tricked now. Whatever scheme you play, we’ll be ready to meet you and beat you.

“Our job is to beat Jim Crow,” Sharpton said emphatically. “We’re going to beat James Crow Jr.”

Glynn Wilson

The Rev. Al Sharpton addresses the crowd gathered for the main rally at the old Alabama Capitol. You can see those old, white columns in the background, symbols of the Old South

YouTube Photo Slide Shows and Videos

Photos From The Final Rally

Photos From The March

Video of The Bridge Crossing

Martin Luther King III Speaks at Alabama Capitol Human Rights Rally

Scenes and Reaction From the Selma-to-Montgomery March 2012

Jesse Jackson Stirs Information Into the Inspiration Gravy in Selma

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis Speaks in White Hall

AFL-CIO’S William Lucy Comments on The Bridge Crossing

Women Join Civil Rights March in Selma

Sharon McClendon Price speaks at The First Baptist Church of Selma on women’s issues on March 6, 2012 at one of the night rallies during the commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery March. This will make you cry.

MSNBC Coverage

In case you missed it, you can see all of the MSNBC coverage here:

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