I visited the childhood home of Jimmy Carter yesterday. For all of our nation’s flaws, it amazes me to think that a man who grew up in a home like this, in a town like this, from a respectable but thoroughly unremarkable family such as this, could eventually lead our nation.
What a country!
I spent today seeing sites in the Montgomery area, such as Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (where King preached) and its parsonage (where he lived) as well as the Rosa Parks Museum. All very worthwhile.
Then I drove the Selma-Montgomery March route. To remind you, this March was to secure voting rights for black Southerners, who had been systematically disenfranchised during the Jim Crow era (the number of registered black voters in Alabama dropped from 180,000 in the late 1800’s to 3,000 in the early 1900’s) and were being subjected to extreme violence in an attempt to intimidate them from registering in the early-to-mid Sixties. The March was pivotal in getting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed in Congress. And until today, I thought that a pretty much the end of it, having forgotten my own favorite dictum “Change is a process, not an event.”
Turns out Alabama whites did not roll over and play dead, despite the new federal laws. The Selma-Montgomery March interpretative center is on the site of what was once “Tent City.” “Tent City” was created by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1965 because white landowners began evicting black tenant farmers who dared to exercise their newly-guaranteed right to register to vote. Some of these families lived in the tents for two and a half years. During those years white night riders routinely shot up Tent City.
I have often told participants in my workshops that “Passing a law is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end of the process of winning justice.” I don’t think I fully understood how true that is until today.
