When making the choice to attend the University of Alabama, I recalled an image from my first-grade social studies book: George Wallace’s Stand at the Schoolhouse Door. Although at six years old I didn’t understand all of the complexities regarding the legacy of colonialism, the European Slave Trade, and Jim Crow-era politics, I never forgot that image. Still, this challenging history did not sway me from attending. Instead, I viewed it as a chance to face some relics and demons from another time—another world—head on.
In 2015, I participated in a march celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March. The original march, now known as Bloody Sunday, was organized on March 7, 1965, by activist Amelia Boynton. On that day, protestors faced teargas attacks from Alabama state troopers, and Boynton was herself beaten to the point of unconsciousness. Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took up the gauntlet and organized a second march that was marred by the sting of police brutality and ultimately punctuated by the vigilante murder of Boston clergyman James Reeb. This garnered national attention, and local and state officials’ unwillingness to take steps to protect the rights of peaceful protestors led to the involvement of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson sent some 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and Federal Marshals to Selma in order to protect the peaceful demonstrators. Along with the murder of Emmett Till, the Birmingham Bus Boycott, and the March on Washington, the Selma to Montgomery March could be considered one of the most pivotal moments of an era.
As one of the few living civil rights leaders, Jesse Jackson provided a link to an occasion most of the people in the crowd, including myself, had previously only been able to engage with through pages in American history books and tidy plaques affixed to seemingly ancient relics.
Walking those same streets half a century later was a powerful thing. The biggest change was perhaps in the clothes we were wearing. Jeans took the place of trousers and tea-length dresses. Nikes replaced dress shoes. Many of the buildings in the area looked historic—beautifully preserved and untouched by the hands of time. Never did I wonder if some of those shop windows once held signs proclaiming “Whites Only.” Even with the seriousness in the air, it was easy to forget the real sense of significance until Jesse Jackson appeared to the crowd via jumbotron. As one of the few living civil rights leaders, he provided a link to an occasion most of the people in the crowd, including myself, had previously only been able to engage with through pages in American history books and tidy plaques affixed to seemingly ancient relics. The march began, and just having the opportunity to walk across that bridge proved incredible. I felt myself being transported back to 1965. How would I have reacted to the threat of billy clubs and teargas? Could I have withstood the trauma as they had?
The struggle to end apartheid in South Africa suddenly became as real and urgent to me as the struggle to end Jim Crow politics had become the moment I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
What I did not know then, as I crept among thousands across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was that the upheaval in Alabama and Dr. King’s vision was not just a national movement. It had stirred the air in Apartheid Era South Africa. When I visited South Africa this summer on a faculty-led study abroad trip, I came to know that mid-20th century political activists had been drawing inspiration from the American civil rights movement. Led by members of the African National Congress such as Nelson Mandela, protestors in South Africa fought against issues all too familiar to African Americans: discriminatory housing practices, passbooks that monitored movement, inequitable funding of segregated schools, state-sanctioned and vigilante lynchings, seizure of property, and the imprisonment and/or murder of men and women in leadership positions. By March 9, 1965, Nelson Mandela had already served three years of a twenty-seven-year prison sentence and had been exiled to Robben Island, a political prison nearly ten miles off the coast of Cape Town. Being able to visit Mandela’s home with his first wife in Soweto (a township outside of Johannesburg) and the jail cell in which Mandela would spend 18 years, the struggle to end apartheid suddenly became as real and urgent to me as the struggle to end Jim Crow politics had become the moment I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
All of this is not to say that one cannot sympathize with struggles for social and political equality without visiting sites firsthand. Rather, my experiences merely challenged my idea of powerful leaders as larger-than-life figures and transformed them in my mind into ordinary men and women who happened to do some extraordinary things.
All of this is not to say that one cannot sympathize with struggles for social and political equality without visiting sites firsthand. Rather, my experiences merely challenged my idea of powerful leaders as larger-than-life figures and transformed them in my mind into ordinary men and women who happened to do some extraordinary things.
 Almosa Pirela-Jones Memphis, TN | AuthorAlmosa Pirela-Jones is a senior majoring in English with a dual minor in creative writing and African-American Studies. Born in Manhattan, she moved to her hometown of Memphis at a young age and graduated from Houston High School in 2013. Almosa serves as the editor-in-chief of Dewpoint Literary Journal and vice president of Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society. Upon graduation, she plans to pursue a career in publishing. |
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