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Alabama and The Civil Rights Movement: Forty-Eight Years Later

Posted: May 20, 2009

 

On this day, May 20, 1961, a white mob attacked a busload of "Freedom Riders" in Montgomery, Alabama, prompting the federal government to send in United States marshals to restore order. (New York Times, May 20, 2009)

And so continued the struggle for civil rights in the south. It would take several more decades for the south to make the tremendous strides necessary to build a more perfect union.

This country now has an black President. For twenty years (1979-1999) , Richard Arrington served as mayor of  Birmingham, Alabama, and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama's 7th District has announced that he will run for governor of Alabama in 2010.

I grew up during the civil rights era. As I wrote in two previous blogs  "Not a Red South or a Blue South but a New South" and "President-elect Barack Obama and the Legacy of Martin Luther King," I saw the signs removed from the restrooms (where blacks were fortunate enough to have public restrooms}, waiting rooms, and water fountains. As a small child, I remember when the local theater in our little town had a separate entrance for blacks and a separate seating area in the balcony of the theater. After the court-ordered desegregation, we kids practically trampled one another in our eagerness to sit in the forbidden balcony.

I remember my first trip to the Civil Rights Memorial in front of what was then the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. Maya Lin's powerful testament to those who gave their lives so that others might have equal rights moved me to tears just as her Vietnam Memorial had done a few years earlier.

In February of this year, I made another pilgrimage to Montgomery. The Southern Poverty Law Center is now housed in an impressive new building and the former building is now a Civil Rights museum. The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church has been carefully preserved as a mute memorial to its pastor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the nearby statehouse, black and white legislators work together to build a better Alabama.

We have come a long way since that December day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and provided the spark for the Montgomery bus boycott. We have come a long way since 1963 when Martin Luther King wrote "Letter from the Birmingham Jail." We have come a long way since "Bloody Sunday" in 1965 when protestors attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in their aborted march from Selma to Montgomery. The tumultuous sixties have finally given birth to a society that is truly becoming a government  "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

As we approach this Memorial Day and pay tribute to those who gave their lives in the defence of liberty, I hope we will remember all those throughout the world who died for the cause of freedom and justice for all.

---Penne J. Laubenthal.
 

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Change during our lifetimes has been constant, but it could never be fast enough. Penne's article reminds me of the separate water coolers in the old courthouse in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. I was a seventh grader when the first African American students entered Lawrence County, Tennessee, schools. The year was 1964, and I thought the battle was over. I took my first (of very few) bus trips in 1967 when I was almost sixteen. We had ridden from our home in Iron City, Tennessee, to Tifton, Georgia with family friends, and we rode the smelly old Greyhound back from South Georgia to Florence Alabama. Being from a very small town, and never having ridden any bus except from Iron City to Loretto during my freshman year of high school in 1966/67, I was completely taken by surprise that those oh so coveted back seats that we happily found empty (only because the whites boarded the bus first--always) were considered "assigned" seating. My fifteen-year-old sister and I were ordered (loudly and rudely) by the driver to sit in the front, and he sat without starting the bus until we surrendered our seats to the very uncomfortable people of color who were standing in the aisle because, with empty seats all around them, they had nowhere to sit. We certainly meant no harm; we had no idea why the driver was yelling at us, and the air was so thick with tension. For us, the event was a bit like getting into trouble at school, but it could have been disastrous. How could so many of us have lived in cocoons?

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