The Shadow of Selma
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.
Contributors: Alma Jean Billingslea Brown | Ben Houston | Peter Ling | Mark McLay | Tony Badger | Clive Webb | Aniko Bodroghkozy | Mark Walmsley | George Lewis | Megan Hunt | Devin Fergus | Barbara Harris Combs | Lynn Mie Itagaki
A shrewd and often-fascinating collection.’—Journal of American History‘An invaluable work on black resistance in film, mass media, political policies, and leadership in the civil rights movement. . . . This study not only furthers ideas of race, class, and autonomy, but it also forces the reader to reexamine the timeline and classic perspectives of the legacy of black agency during the civil rights movement, generally, and in Selma specifically.’—Journal of Southern History
Deftly interrogates the past, present, and future of race and justice in the United States through the lens of the Selma campaign’s various meanings and legacies.'—John A. Kirk, author of Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1970'A fascinating and thought-provoking reflection on the dramatic events, popular memory, and ambiguous legacy of one of the pivotal campaigns of the civil rights movement. By exploring the story of Selma from a wide range of original perspectives, this timely and engaging collection makes a valuable contribution to the way we understand the broader struggle for civil rights in the past and present. '—Stephen Tuck, author of The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest
Joe Street, associate professor in history at Northumbria University, is the author of Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash and The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement. Henry Knight Lozano, senior lecturer in American history at the University of Exeter, is the author of Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869–1929 and California and Hawai’i Bound: U.S. Settler Colonialism and the Pacific West, 1848–1959.
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Selma and the Voting Rights Act
1. Selma: The Bridge and Beyond
Alma Jean Billingslea Brown
2. Before the Bridge: Grassroots Activism in Selma in the Early 1960s
Ben Houston
3. Nonviolence Crowned or De-Throned? King’s Strategy in Selma and Its Legacy
Peter Ling
4. “The Meat in the Coconut”: Lyndon Johnson and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
Mark McLay
5. Backlash or Adjustment? The White South responds to Selma
Tony Badger
6. “We Cannot Escape the Same Challenge”: Britain, France, and the US Voting Rights Act
Clive Webb
Part 2: Media and Memory
7. Mediating Selma: 1965, 2015
Aniko Bodroghkozy
8. “They Just Couldn’t Write it the Way it Wasn’t Anymore”: Mainstream Media Narratives and the 1965 Selma Campaign
Mark Walmsley
9. Sidelining Selma’s Segregationists: Memory, Strategy, Ideology and Agency
George Lewis
10. “Men and Women of God and Goodwill Everywhere”: Selma and the Role of Religion in Civil Rights Drama
Megan Hunt
11. The Third Reconstruction: The Racial Wealth Gap in the Post-Civil Rights South
Devin Fergus
12. How the Rise of Colorbind Racism Opened the Door for the Supreme Court Decision in Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder
Barbara Harris Combs
13. Racial Laundering of Equality after Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder
Lynn Mie Itagaki
Notes
List of contributors
Index
