By Cole Manley
Marches have been a vital component of social movements around the world, and this is particularly true when it comes to movements for racial and economic justice in the United States. Marches do not usually involve running, although you can certainly run if you want. But running and walking, especially long distances, requires great endurance and perseverance. Think about the most powerful images of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. What do you see? Many see marches.
The Selma to Montgomery March was perhaps the greatest endurance feat of the 1960s marches. Over five days, covering some 54 miles, thousands of participants walked the two-lane road (now a more modern highway) from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama, ending at the state capitol, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a rousing speech in support of voting rights. By the end, they numbered some 25,000. They camped and slept on the side of the road, braving rain and sun and the threat of white supremacist violence. In the months before the march, white and Black organizers in and around Selma had been targeted and killed by white vigilantes and police.
The Selma to Montgomery March today seems like a coronation of the Voting Rights movement, the protest most closely linked to the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, but, back then, organizers risked everything as they kept walking--step by step--all the way to Montgomery. The danger and fear of counter attacks was intense and omnipresent in the weeks before the protest, and, even as the March proceeded, there was no guarantee that voting rights legislation would be passed. Nonetheless, the 1965 March was a moment of great political optimism and unity for the marchers themselves. Along the way, they gained inspiration and courage from each other, from the sense that they were making history.
There are other marches that demand attention from the 1950s and 1960s, and I may write about these in future posts. But, today, as we drop off ballots in boxes, or mail them in, we are participating in a very direct form of democracy. It is a form of democracy that is not without many barriers and weaknesses (voter suppression, the Electoral College, the two-party system, to name a few), but it is, nonetheless, a form of democracy that tens of thousands walked 54 miles in March of 1965 in order to safeguard and protect.
The historical parallels between 2020 and 1965 are many. White supremacist violence is again on the rise, enabled by a president who counts KKK leaders, anti-Semitic organizers, and conspiracy theorists as his friends. At the same time, just as thousands forced the nation to confront its history of voter suppression in 1965, today a mass movement of people--the Black Lives Matter movement--is again awakening the soul of this country and compelling us to put on our walking (or running) shoes.
It is time to march. It is time to vote.
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