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There are so many moments throughout history whose untold and overlooked stories make them much more fascinating than the versions that are typically taught or talked about in the classroom. The 1965 civil rights march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery is one of those stories.
For that reason, among others, I am looking forward to the national conversation Selma raises when it opens in theaters across the United States this week. The issues the 1965 Selma campaign raised are all too familiar today: voting rights, the shooting of an unarmed man by a state trooper, the efficacy of protest, and the role of politicians in movements for social change.
In the run-up to the release of Selma, there also has been a lot of conversation about who exactly was responsible for the political shift and resulting legislation. What role did activists play? What role did the president play? A careful study of this history reveals that a diverse group of constituents—members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), individuals (white, black, Jewish, Northern, Southern, and many others who pushed for change), and activists including John Lewis, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hosea Williams—all came together to create the conditions that allowed American President Lyndon Baines Johnson to rally popular and political support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
What is so often lost in the teaching of the march, and what makes its particular history so compelling, is that it was the collective actions of these groups and individuals, from a variety of backgrounds and philosophies, that together pushed politicians into creating one of the defining pieces of legislation of the 20th century.
Too often, a study of this history is disconnected from an understanding of the larger goals and strategies of civil rights leaders. Historical events, like the march in Selma, often are taught as dates on a timeline, before one event and after the next, leaving students with a sense of historical inevitability. In a Facing History and Ourselves classroom, educators emphasize the importance of slowing down the study of history and exploring the choices made by people in the past, as well as consequences of their actions. Indeed, many civil rights leaders were quite intentional. They made strategic decisions based on principles in addition to lessons they drew from their own successes and failures.
In his autobiography, Dr. King explained:
The goal of the demonstrations in Selma, as elsewhere, is to dramatize the existence of injustice and to bring about the presence of justice methods of nonviolence. Long years of experience indicate to us that Negroes can achieve this goal when four things occur:
Nonviolent demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights.
Racists resist by unleashing violence against them.
Americans of conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation.
The administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention and remedial legislation
The original focus of civil rights activists in Selma was voter registration, not the march from Selma to Montgomery. Before the march, in the first few weeks of 1965, SNCC and local activists intensified their campaign to register black voters. Local black leaders asked the SCLC to join the campaign in Selma to protest discriminatory voting practices.
