Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He
was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was
killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the
moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those [Jim
Crow] days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling
thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the
bars.
John Lewis;
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html
Those eloquent words expressed by the dying John Lewis may persuade Americans
to recognize the almost unimaginable, daily horrors of state-sponsored Jim Crow
terrorism, horrors every black family living in southern, southwestern, and
Border states experienced. It may be easy for some to claim we’re not part of
that horror, that that was in the past and in locations where we didn’t live, however,
as William Faulkner so perceptively wrote in the novel, Requiem for a Nun,
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The power of Faulkner’s observation can be seen in today’s racial turmoil that has given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and to the drive for the removal of statues and monuments honoring Confederates who were traitors to their country during war and unapologetic advocates of enslaving humans for their personal profit.
In Lewis’s remarkable deathbed essay, he urged Americans to “. . . study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time.” So, in honor of the life and indomitable spirit of John Lewis, I offer the following brief reflection.
Who
Was Edmund Pettus?
Many Southerners might tell you he was the son of a wealthy
planter, a lawyer, distinguished citizen of Selma, and a great Alabamian
deserving of all sorts of accolades. Some might try to amend that by adding he
fought the Civil War to keep slavery alive and well. Others would focus on his
years of service as a decorated Confederate general and try to steer you away
from the not so edifying fact he was also the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku
Klux Klan.
Historians, on the other hand, like University of Alabama
history professor John Giggie, cite the record of his lifelong love of and
support for white supremacy. According to Giggie, “Pettus became for Alabama’s
white citizens in the decades after the Civil War, a living testament to the
power of whites to sculpt a society modeled after slave society.” Here’s how James
W. Flynt, University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn
University, assessed Pettus: “His fanaticism is borne of a kind of pro-slavery
belief that his civilization cannot be maintained without slavery.”
Edmund Pettus was an unrepentant white supremacist and
that’s who the City of Selma proudly named that bridge after.
It was on that bridge in 1965 that hundreds of peaceful
civil rights advocates marching to Montgomery were attacked and beaten savagely
by white Alabama State Troopers. It turns out that bridge may be renamed after an
extraordinarily courageous black man whose skull was fractured in the infamous
1965 melee by the baton of a white State Trooper; that courageous man was John
Lewis. Perhaps if that bridge were renamed, Americans might be able to put
Edmund Pettus where he belongs in the historical perspective of state-sponsored
Jim Crow terrorism and white racism and better understand why John Lewis fought
so hard throughout his adult life for the rights guaranteed to all citizens by
the U.S. Constitution.
Even if Edmund Pettus’s name is removed from the bridge, no
mean feat in a state where such removal is only with the consent of a very
conservative legislature, Americans should never forget who he was and what he
and his fellow white racists stood for. We also should never forget the violence
they unleashed on black Americans like John Lewis with the consent and support
of the State of Alabama. Thankfully, we can celebrate the reality that Lewis and
thousands of like-minded civil rights activists became the antidote to Jim Crow
terrorism and to the poison that infected people like Pettus.
