The Shadow of Selma, livre ebook

The Shadow of Selma evaluates the 1965 civil rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, the historical memory of the campaign’s marches, and the continuing relevance of and challenges to the Voting Rights Act. The contributors present Selma not just as a keystone event but, much like Ferguson today, as a transformative place: a supposedly unimportant location that became the focal point of epochal historical events. By shifting the focus from leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to the thousands of unheralded people who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge—and the networks that undergirded and opposed them—this innovative volume considers the campaign’s long-term impact and its place in history.

The volume recalls the historical currents that surrounded Selma, discussing grassroots activism, the role of President Lyndon B. Johnson during the struggle for the Voting Rights Act, and the political reaction to Selma at home and abroad. Using Ava DuVernay’s 2014 Hollywood film as a stepping stone, the editors bring together various essays that address the ways media—from television and newspaper coverage to “race beat” journalism—represented and reconfigured Selma. The contributors underline the power of misrepresentation in shaping popular memory and in fueling a redemptive narrative that glosses over ongoing racial problems. Finally, the volume traces the fifty-year legacy of the Voting Rights Act. It reveals the many subtle and overt methods by which opponents of racial equality attempted to undo the act’s provisions, with a particular focus on the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that eliminated sections of the act designed to prevent discrimination.

Taken together, the essays urge readers not to be blind to forms of discrimination and injustice that continue to shape inequalities in the United States. They remind us that while today’s obstacles to racial equality may look different from a literacy test or a grimfaced Alabama state trooper, they are no less real.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1: Selma and the Voting Rights Act

Chapter 1. Selma: The Bridge and Beyond
Alma Jean Billingslea Brown

Chapter 2. Before the Bridge: Grassroots Activism in Selma in the Early 1960s
Ben Houston

Chapter 3. Nonviolence Crowned or De-Throned? King’s Strategy in Selma and Its Legacy
Peter Ling

Chapter 4. “The Meat in the Coconut”: Lyndon Johnson and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
Mark McLay

Chapter 5. Backlash or Adjustment? The White South responds to Selma
Tony Badger

Chapter 6. “We Cannot Escape the Same Challenge”: Britain, France, and the US Voting Rights Act
Clive Webb

Part 2: Media and Memory

Chapter 7. Mediating Selma: 1965, 2015
Aniko Bodroghkozy

Chapter 8. “They Just Couldn’t Write it the Way it Wasn’t Anymore”: Mainstream Media Narratives and the 1965 Selma Campaign
Mark Walmsley

Chapter 9. Sidelining Selma’s Segregationists: Memory, Strategy, Ideology and Agency
George Lewis

Chapter 10. “Men and Women of God and Goodwill Everywhere”: Selma and the Role of Religion in Civil Rights Drama
Megan Hunt

Part 3: The Shadow of Selma

Chapter 11. The Third Reconstruction: The Racial Wealth Gap in the Post-Civil Rights South
Devin Fergus

Chapter 12. How the Rise of Colorbind Racism Opened the Door for the Supreme Court Decision in Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder
Barbara Harris Combs

Chapter 13. Racial Laundering of Equality after Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder
Lynn Mie Itagaki

Notes

List of Contributors

Index