Free at last?






Also in this series:
Bush against Bush (Apr 30, '04)
Kerry, the Yankee muchacho  (May 7, '04)
You have the right to be misinformed  (May 8, '04)
An American tragedy (May 11, '04)
In the heart of Bushland (May 12, '04)
The war of the snuff videos (May 13, '04)
The Iraq gold rush (May 14, '04)
The new beat generation (May 15, '04)
Taliban in Texas: Big Oil hankers for old pals (May 18, '04)
Life is a beach. Or is it?  (May 19, '04)
Cuba libre  (May 21, '04)
Miami vice and virtue (May 22, '04) 
Georgia on his mind (May 27, '04)

"... Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream ..."
Dr Martin Luther King's favorite paraphrase of Amos 5:24

SELMA and MONTGOMERY, Alabama - There's hardly a more moving and powerful statement in the whole United States than the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, designed by Maya Lin with absolute Zen-like simplicity. In white lines radiating like the hands of a clock, a circular black-granite slab details the history and the names of the martyrs of the civil-rights movement from 1954 to 1968, when Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee: ordinary men and women who were the leaders of a true revolution.

Water emerges from the center of the slab and flows gently across the top. Behind it there's a wall of curved black granite, engraved with King's words quoted above. Oblivious to Southern heat and humidity, one can actually touch the words, see them behind the water, feel their power.

Any informal conversation in Alabama inevitably touches the point that the civil-rights movement may have brought extraordinary changes to the South, and to the United States as a whole. But in the same breath our interlocutor will add that progress has not erased the legacy of centuries of racial oppression. Today it's still the same struggle for equality in education, jobs and housing.

There were somewhat subdued commemorations in the US for the 50 years of the landmark Brown vs the Topeka Board of Education, when the US Supreme Court agreed that segregation in public schools denied black children "equal protection" before the law and cultivated a perception that blacks were inferior: in 1955, chief justice Earl Warren finally issued a court order demanding the end of school segregation.

J L Chestnut Jr, a partner at the law firm Chestnut, Sanders, Sanders, Pettway & Campbell, offers a very enlightening perspective. After Brown was decided on May 17, 1954, Chestnut "four years later returned to Selma as the first black person to open a law office in the dreadful little town of my birth. It is difficult to even imagine how awful and dangerous it was to be black in the Black Belt of Alabama in 1958." At the time, integrationists "were perceived in the white South as part of an axis of evil. The other parts of the axis were 'communists' and 'feminists', but they were less menacing because most white Southerners had never met one."

Chestnut agrees that "the new army of American black voters helped produce some substantial changes on the surface, but beneath the exterior facade, much of that racial and racist substance has not really changed". The United States, says Chestnut, a huge and complex nation, remains controlled by "special-interest ruling groups which are overwhelmingly white and male. Many are racist, others mean well but don't have a clue about the awful reality of institutional racism or what it means to be an African-American." The "terrible effects of racism and exploitation are still with us today", he adds, giving as an example: "misguided voters in Alabama, black and white, who recently helped millionaires who have never paid their fair share of taxes keep it that way and at the expense of public schools".

His judgment on the administration of President George W Bush is scathing: "Bush and his crowd prefer a more subtle racism, benign neglect, phony race-neutral debate and dishonest denial, an approach that was also perfected in the South. The Bush crowd also understands that a sense of white privilege is much harder to remove than segregation laws."

Many black Americans would agree with Chestnut. And almost certainly, all educated black Americans are fuming with the situation concerning education. There's a sense that schools with more poor children - almost always black, and the ones who qualify for free breakfast and lunch - have more children who don't pass.

William Honey, publisher of Montgomery Living magazine, stresses how dysfunctional the Bush educational policy may be: "The sad feature of the No Child Left Behind legislation is that schools with more children who don't pass are branded 'poor', regardless of the quality of the teachers and administration, and schools with more 'advantaged' children are rewarded with more funds to perpetuate the distinction between the education you get if you're rich or poor."
But there seems to be an exception in Alabama itself: the 100-year-old Highland Elementary, where 80 percent of students get free meals because they're indeed poor, but at the same time scored very high on the No Child Left Behind testing. The principal, Patricia Kornegay, is adamant: "Poverty is no excuse not to learn." So what's the secret? It is heavy community support and heavily involved teachers, unsung heroes who have to struggle against lack of funds for professional development, very large classes, and derelict buildings.

The red badge of courage
Montgomery, self-described "Capital City of the American South", bills itself as "courageous, visionary, rebellious". The subtext that cannot be spelled out is that all these qualities seem to have stemmed from its black citizens.

The historic abyss between blacks and whites in Alabama can still be literally felt a single block away from the white-dominated State Capitol, where King ended the 54-mile (87-kilometer) walk from Brown Chapel Church in Selma to Montgomery in 1965, the civil-rights march that was the culmination of the most effective grassroots movement in the history of modern protest. As one looks at the pulpit in Dexter Avenue Baptist Church - where King served as pastor from 1954-60 - one can almost feel him talking about peaceful revolution. This is also where thousands rallied around seamstress Rosa Parks in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 that led to an end to official segregation.

The Civil War started officially in Montgomery. Today the city is in full "we support our US military" mode. In Montgomery Living magazine everybody - even in the ads - is white. There's always a subtle reminder somewhere of Ole Miss, the University of neighboring Mississippi, which was segregated until 1961. Culture is celebrated in the form of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Potential spectators of Titus Andronicus - a graphic story of war very much in evidence after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal - are advised that it "contains adult content".

In neighboring Georgia, George W Bush may win as "the person you most love to hate" in a cheerful poll by a Savannah paper. Not in Alabama. Here, for many people, work is just another place for serious worship. It's not uncommon to see employees wearing Jesus T-shirts or the new craze - Ten Commandments lapel pins. The Foundation for Moral Law sells them for only US$5 each on its website.

Alabama is one of the most conservative states in the US. Take Gary Palmer, president of the Alabama Policy Institute. In a fascinating bout of historic revisionism, Palmer maintains that former president Jimmy Carter "allowed Iran, a key US ally and perhaps the most Western of the Middle Eastern nations, to be taken over by radical Shi'ites". Nowadays, along with Carter, Senator Teddy Kennedy has become "the most potent propaganda weapon in al-Qaeda's arsenal for encouraging more deadly attacks against our forces and for undermining the morale of our troops and the American public". The solution in Iraq is, of course, to "stay the course": "If we keep killing or capturing their leaders and their followers wherever they are ... we will eventually win. We will win because we will have demonstrated to the vast majority of Muslims that we have the stomach for the fight." So in the end it's all Teddy Kennedy's fault, because he is "trying to slow us down, impeding our chances to win".

The last time a Democrat won in Alabama was 1976. John Kerry's prospects may be shinier, considering that in a recent Mobile Register-University of South Alabama survey only 43 percent of people in the state now believe in the Bush strategy in Iraq. On the other hand, more than 60 percent believe the Abu Ghraib scandal was an isolated incident, 73 percent think the Pentagon should not release more Abu Ghraib photos, and 66 percent believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should not resign. This all means that most people in Alabama are staunch Republicans no matter what.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's house in a beautiful, leafy neighborhood is still there: this is where they lived from October 1931 to April 1932, while Scott was writing Tender Is the Night and Zelda - one of four daughters of a judge on the Alabama Supreme Court - was writing Southern Girl, before she had one of her schizophrenia attacks.

The house still exudes an image of some sort of Southern arcadia. But then this passage of F Scott Fitzgerald's "Echoes of the Jazz Age" creeps into mind, and spoils the magic: "Now once again the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth."

The road from Selma
Most army uniforms that appear on CNN and Fox News reports on the war on Iraq are made in Selma by American Apparel, the largest single manufacturer of military uniforms in the US. The firm is in Alabama, although its chief executive officer prefers to live in Austin, Texas. Inside one finds a US version of an Asian sweatshop, with dozens of seamstresses, the contemporary versions of Rosa Parks, working on assembling huge batches of all sorts of clothes, cables hanging from the ceiling and Stars and Stripes dotting the warehouse. Most employees are black. The difference with Asia is that they work eight-hour days maximum, and only five days a week.

There are still hundreds of Civil War-era houses in Selma, all of them marked by blue shields, including the fabulous St James Hotel, the oldest still standing in the South (built in 1837). But the real thing is the Edmund Pettus bridge, still carrying old Highway 80 - the Southern Pacific - over the Alabama river. Here is the intersection of Selma's Civil War history with the civil-rights movement - which is basically the same struggle.

The National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma keeps history alive, using photos and handbills to tell the whole story, centered on local grassroots activists, hugely brave and never celebrated. On March 4, 2005, there will be a huge commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Black Sunday and the march from Selma to Montgomery led by King. In 2000, Bill Clinton became the first sitting US president to come to Selma to join. In 2003, the Reverend Jesse Jackson called it "an annual pilgrimage" and said he "will never miss it": Selma, for him, is "sacred ground". John Kerry has been to the pilgrimage, marching alongside Jesse Jackson.

At the Museum and Institute, a very articulate visitor from Illinois erupts in outrage: "There's no money for education. And now we can't finance our addiction to oil. Since last year a barrel of oil went up by $10. Can you imagine if that lasts for a whole year? We would lose $50 billion in consumer spending, and lose 0.5 percent of our economic growth." Faya Ora Rose Toure, chief editor of the museum's 2004 bridge-crossing commemorative newspaper, from the heights of her Malian name, says almost exactly the same words of a black community leader in Houston two weeks ago: "As we commemorate the voting-rights struggle, we must remember Dr King's opposition to the Vietnam War. Certainly if he was here today, he would also oppose the war on Iraq."

In 1963 King said, "One day the South will recognize its real heroes." One of these heroes is the now nonagenarian Dorothy Height, who was a leader of the civil-rights movement from the beginning and then was president of the National Council of Negro Women for 41 years. Her book Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2003) is a must-read. Height is a supreme realist: "There are so many things that have been undone and so many ways in which we have advanced, but at the same time, the poorest seem to be poorer and the poverty among us seems to be entrenched. We have more blacks and women in high positions; we have the value of the Supreme Court's recent decisions on affirmative action ... But we have to admit that we have a long way to go."

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