I am not sure how exactly our interest in the civil rights movement got started but today we added another chapter to the book. It seems when you travel in the south you are confronted with so much history that pertains to the civil rights movement that it is difficult not to be caught up in the history of it. Both Janet and I had good friends who were black at a very young ages. I went to both a Junior High in Muncie, Indiana and Muncie Central High School in the late 60's and early 70's where racial problems were a frequent occurrence. I even got a week out of high school for a confrontation with some black classmates but for me race had nothing to do with it. Some of my best friends in high school who I had known for years were black. I wasn't expelled but just ask not to return for a week for my own safety. They said get on your motorcycle (at the time I had a 1967 650 Triumph Bonneville) and get away from the school for the next week. My parents didn't believe that I wasn't expelled until they called the school for themselves. Getting back to Selma. It is a small town of about 20,000 people. Registering to vote if you were black in the early 60's in Selma, Alabama was almost impossible and if you were able to register, actually voting as a black person was even harder. Before voting you might be asked to tell the voting poll worker how many jelly beans were in a jar, or how many cotton balls were in a jar, or how many soap bubbles were in a jar of soap and water before you could vote. Since no guessed the correct number of jelly beans, cotton balls, or soap bubbles no one got to vote. Just think this is in a community where over half of the residents were black. In 1961 only 156 of the over 15,000 African Americans in Dallas county were register to vote. An event in February of 1965 that got people upset was the shooting of a young black man who later died who was trying to protect his mother and grandmother from a rioting crowd of people. What actually brought the racial conflict to the national stage was the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama on March 7, 1965. Many people were severely beaten on the Edmund Pettus bridge which is six blocks from where the march started at the Brown Chapel. While the march wasn't completed on March 7th some two weeks later 3,000 people started the 34 mile march again and 25,000 finished it a few days later. The history is very interesting and it's hard to imagine that people were treated like that in this country less than 50 years ago. Here are the pictures. Hope you enjoy them.
If I could vacuum up all of the cotton from the side of the road on our trip today I could supply Warsaw with cotton balls for a decade.
This is the historic bridge where the Bloody Sunday confrontation took place that made national headlines.
The March started at the Brown Chapel which is about six blocks away from the Edmund Pettus bridge.
What would be your odds on being able to vote?
This is a neat little church we saw on the way back to Gulf Shores.
The primary business in this part of Alabama seems to be logging.
