Introduction to Special Issue: We March Lest We Forget

On Sunday, March 8, 2015, the two of us joined over 40,000 people as we marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a name that aptly describes the consequence of approximately 600 peaceful protesters who, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, boldly marched across that same bridge in symbolic protest for social justice and voting rights for African Americans. The shooting of a young Black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by local Ku Klux Klan members instigated the 1965 march. After the protesters chose not to heed a police warning to “disperse and return to your homes or to your church” they were tear gassed, chased and severely beaten by police. Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march back to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time with 2,500 protesters. Although during the second march Dr. King decided to stop short of marching across the bridge, within 2 weeks he organized a much larger march to the state capital in Montgomery, Alabama with nearly 25,000 people participating. When they arrived, Dr. King handed Governor George Wallace a petition, which led to President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the voting rights into law on August 6, 1965. The scenes of Bloody Sunday, the March to Montgomery, and the violence and victory that resulted remain preserved within city, regional, and national public memory.

This memory of audacity that accompanied the protesters' bloody sacrifice was the subject of President Barack Obama's searing 2015 commemoration speech about the continuities between yesterday's and today's struggle for racial and social justice in America. In each case, Black men and women died unjustly at the hands of the police. In each case, ordinary citizens were treated inhumanely because of the color of their skin. Obama's speech on the 50^th anniversary of Bloody Sunday is symbolic in many ways. The Edmund Pettus Bridge was named to commemorate a noted Democratic U.S. Senator, Confederate Brigadier General during the civil war, and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. In juxtaposition to the pasts symbolism of Edmund Pettus, the path to and around the bridge where President Obama was delivering his commemorative speech was marked by handmade signs reading, “Justice for Trayvon,” “No Justice, No Peace,” “I can't breathe,” “Black Power!” and “Stop mass incarceration now!” We were awestruck by the stark contrasts between Black and White, the 1940 commemoration, 1965 march led by King, and the 2015 semicentennial anniversary march, as well as a sense of place defined by an unjust state authority versus one that is now celebratory of equal rights.

As the weekend progressed it became very clear that the Edmund Pettus Bridge, originally a symbol of New South progress, then later a place of racial violence and resilience, was now serving as a symbolic and literal “bridge” between the past, present, and future. The commemorative history of the bridge assumed the current-day public memory of racial struggles in the United States. The 50^th anniversary jubilee event functioned in three very prominent ways: (a) to engage multiple publics in the discussion of social justice; (b) to signify the progress and the significant work still yet to be done; and (c) to commemorate while galvanizing the masses around the issues of police brutality, voting, civil rights, and varying causes pertaining to social justice. The significance of this can be best understood within historical context; hence we will explore three epistemic and sociopolitical moments: 1940, 1965, and 2015.

The 1940 commemoration

The Edmund Pettus Bridge was originally commemorated in May of 1940. It was a three-day celebration including the crowning of a pageant queen, public speeches, tours, theatrical depictions of Selma's past, parades, and luncheons. Public officials designated the weekend with letters and declarations. A 15-page pamphlet highlighted the town, the ceremony, the bridge, the history of Selma, and the life of Edmund Pettus (City of Selma, 1940).

The three days of celebration commemorated the life of Edmund Pettus, Selma's survival of the Civil War, and Selma's future as a place of “New South progress,” a term implicitly characterized by White racial hegemony. A description of Pettus is found in the commemorative program lauding his activities during the Civil War and heralding his rise to Brigadier General in 1863. Pettus fought at Vicksburg where his “daring and courage” had become “legendary” (City of Selma, 1940, p. 4). Pettus returned home where he served one term in the United States Senate and was elected to a second term during which he died. What is not mentioned is Pettus's work as a Klansman. Pettus represents Selma's, and its White residents', survival, rise, and success after the Civil War. As the commemorative program stated, “the name Edmund Winston Pettus rises again with this great bridge”(City of Selma, 1940, p. 4). Indeed, the name and bridge “rise again” much like the White South, and even Selma, rose from the ashes of Sherman's march. The original bridge ceremony commemorated White New South progress and Confederate mythology. In 1940 as Selma commemorated Pettus, U.S. race relations and world events were volatile. The United States elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for his third term in office. In Congress, Southern opposition blocked the Costigan-Wagner antilynching bill in 1935, but the bill managed to draw national attention to the problem (DeCuir, 2008). World War II advanced as Adolph Hitler strengthened alliances with Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union as Germany invaded much of Western Europe. Hitler's agenda of White supremacy and Arian rule advanced aggressively and violently.

Meanwhile, in Alabama, Jim Crow laws continued to be placed on the books. Alabama passed a Miscegenation law prohibiting intermarriage and cohabitation between Whites and Blacks or the descendant of any Negro. The penalty was imprisonment in the penitentiary for 2 to 7 years. Ministers and justices of the peace who married interracial couples faced fines between $100 and $1,000 and could be imprisoned in the county jail for up to 6 months. Railroad travel in the state of Alabama maintained “separate but equal” waiting spaces for Whites and Blacks and separate accommodations on railroad cars. Alabama education provided “separate but equal” schools for White and Black children (Brown & Stentiford, 2014; Stetson, 2010).

In this context, the Edmund Pettus Bridge stood not just as a symbol of White Selma hope, White Southern identity, and New South progress; but also as a testament of a time when Jim Crow Laws, Ku Klux Klan justice, and White Supremacy reflected violent racial world views.

1965

Over the next 25 years racial tension in the United States would increase. The NAACP tackled Jim Crow Laws through legal persistence. Racial tensions grew throughout the South as protests and legal cases were used to fight social injustice—the overturning of “separate but equal” in Brown vs. Board of Education; the resulting school desegregation protests in Little Rock, Ole Miss, and University of Alabama; Black church fires and bombings in Birmingham; bus boycotts in Montgomery; the Children's Campaign in Kellie Ingram Park; the voting rights campaign; and the numerous accounts of violence by White resistance. Southern governors such as Orville Flaubus and George Wallace used fear-based demagogic approaches while fighting against federal legislation for integration. Following the assassination of President Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson wrestled with the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the need for change to voting laws. The tension between federal and state governments, Whites and Blacks, lawmakers, and the public remained unrelenting. March of 1965 saw these tensions encapsulated on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

The naming and first commemoration of the Edmund Pettus Bridge took place before Blacks acquired the needed “power and access” to create “historical memory” (Brundage, 2000). The fight for civil rights and voting rights also resulted in the ability to challenge public memories. The events on Bloody Sunday in 1965 would forever be remembered through the video and photographs taken by journalists capturing the police beatings of protesters. Perhaps one of the most notable venues for these photos was Life Magazine. Photographers Charles Moore, Flip Schulke, and Frank Dandridge captured images later archived in the Smithsonian. According to rhetorical scholars Gallagher and Zagacki (2007), the Life photographs potentially influenced the Congressional debates over the Voting Rights Act by visually communicating the “otherness” associated with White supremacy. The behavior of White police toward Black protesters symbolically asked “viewers to make a choice” and to consider whether such behavior represented democracy (Gallagher & Zagacki, 2007).

Images such as those in Life Magazine visually memorialized the events of Bloody Sunday and the resulting March to Montgomery (Jackson, 2006). The public memory of the Edmund Pettus Bridge once associated with the New South and industrial progress would now be layered with a different “progress”: the advancement of civil rights and social justice. In the 1960s Blacks gained civil rights and voting rights; however, they also acquired some power and access to influence and create historical memory through commemoration.

2015

Fifty years after the 1965 March to Montgomery, the Edmund Pettus Bridge once again gained the attention of the nation. Over 70,000 people would descend upon a city with a population of approximately 20,000. Once again the bridge would be honored and, like its 1940 commemoration, there would be historical depictions, speeches by politicians and dignitaries, tours, luncheons, and remembrance. Unlike the 1940 commemoration, the “progress” discussed was not about economic or industrial progress of Selma but of the need for social justice and the 2013 “gutting” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Fausset, 2015). As protesters crossed the bridge on Sunday to re-enact and remember, many held signs protesting recent police shootings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and others. Chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter” could be heard as marchers crossed the bridge. The catchphrases have now been so indelibly etched into the American consciousness that they required no further explanation. Likewise, words like Selma, Ferguson, and Trayvon are more than one-word monikers used to call to mind the atrocities associated with the devaluation of human lives. They have also become the symbolic, pop-cultural, and discursive reminders that postracial and postracist periods have not yet arrived (Dyson, 2017). The irony or perhaps connection of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black man killed in 1965 by KKK, and that of recent shootings of unarmed Black men followed protesters as they crossed the bridge. The 2015 anniversary march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge was as much about remembering what happened in 1965 as it was about reflecting on what still needs to be solved in 2015.

Contemporary events both before and after the bridge crossing call into question racial boundaries and margins within the United States. In 2015 President Barak Obama spoke at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Attorney General Eric Holder spoke Sunday in the Brown AME Church. A Black President and a Black Attorney General to some would signal a post-racial America. Yet the videos of police shootings of Black males and females across the United States in the last 5 years, the rampant racism that gripped institutions of higher education in 2015 and 2016 alone, the disproportionate number of Blacks incarcerated due to unfair and lopsided sentencing, and the voices of protest by Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter groups exist as counter arguments to the idea of “postrace” (Alexander, 2012; Dyson, 2017; Glaude, 2016). In fact, what these examples signify is race matters.

Indeed, as the 2016 election came to a close many pundits and spokespeople claimed many minority voters felt they heard nothing positive about race. Although one candidate used race to bait voters, the other said little at all about it. Democrats took the Black vote for granted and the KKK endorsed Donald Trump (Anderson, 2016). In many ways, we seem to have crossed the bridge only to find what's on the other side is a replica of what we left behind. We were reminded why we need commemorations of this kind when one marcher casually remarked, “We march, lest we forget.” This quote indicates the influence and pertinence of public memory discourses surrounding the March on Selma's 50^th anniversary jubilee. The commemorative discourses and performances went beyond pomp and circumstance and functioned in three very prominent ways: (a) to engage multiple publics in the discussion of social justice; (b) to signify the progress and the significant work still yet to be done; and to (c) commemorate while galvanizing the masses around the issues of police brutality, voting, civil rights, and varying causes pertaining to social justice. This special issue seeks to do the same.

About the special issue

This timely volume entitled “We March Lest We Forget” not only explores why marching and other forms of social protest matter, but also provides a close look at contemporary race-related commemorations for social justice and/or human rights in the United States. As the essays here investigate contemporary symbolic acts of resistance and their relationship to civil rights commemoration they also explore the degree to which remembering and forgetting civil rights struggles of the past reframes, restates, and re-examines the fight for social justice today. For example, during the week leading up to March 8, 2015 more than 100,000 people gathered to commemorate Bloody Sunday, and the sacrifices people made to ensure that African Americans were permitted voting rights already promised to them via previous legislation. Yet the march was linked in media and popular culture to Ferguson and recent young, Black, male deaths. Present day civil rights activism is in fact an amalgam of struggles for social justice. This special issue is not just about civil rights as an indicator of a 1960s' freedom struggle, but also about all struggles for basic citizen rights since the 1960s.

As this special issue is being released it has been less than two months since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45^th President of the United States of America. We would be remiss if we did not comment on it. During the week of his inauguration there were mass protests and marches including the Saturday Women's March on Washington. Democracy Spring, ANSWER, #BlackLivesMatter, and #DisruptJ20 were among the notable groups of demonstrators with profound public statements that pushed back against what each perceived to be a wildly unpopular, antidemocratic, misogynist, and exclusionary U.S. President. These protests exemplify why this special issue is necessary. It is about honoring the voices present within the public sphere and concomitant counterpublics that work arduously toward ensuring social justice. What does a nation comprised of nearly 50% women do when a president thinks it's okay to approach women and “grab them in the p^***y”? How do those who care about Selma watch Donald Trump refer to Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis as “all talk, talk, talk—no action or results” and standby idly?

The questions this special issue seeks to address are as follows: How does remembrance of civil rights gains help us to address present social realities? Do commemorations like the one in Selma help build a better citizenry? Does the news coverage across public events threaten social justice? What kinds of convergent and divergent discourses emerge in these kinds of commemorations and why? What is the value and significance of films and other popular culture in helping to shape discourses of solidarity, public memory, struggle, and social justice?

Summary of essays

This special issue is a direct response to the historical, recent, and continuing devaluation of Black lives as evidenced by publicized national incidences of police brutality where Black males have been murdered. The subsequent public commemorations and open resistances have been more than a culmination of discourses about public memory, struggle, and civil rights. They have also been about social justice and humane treatment of all citizens. “We March Lest We Forget” is a set of essays that explore why citizens resist so that they are heard and why they march so that the sacrifices of those who struggled for civil rights are not forgotten.

The special issue will have two parts: essays and forum commentaries. The essays are remarkable full-length academic essays analyzing events related to the theme. The forum essays are a set of short commentaries from scholars and public figures that address the current crisis in direct, intellectually astute, and sobering terms.

The first essay, “Still Work to Be Done: The Million Man March and the 50^th Anniversary Commemoration Selma to Montgomery March as Mythoform and Visual Rhetoric,” is by Carlos Morrison and Jacqueline Trimble. It is apropos in that it explores why marching is significant, and then discusses a particular genre of marching the authors identify as symbolic marching. Unlike marches that were direct messages to power structures, Morrison and Trimble argue that symbolic marches are distinctive in their intent and outcomes. These marches are designed to atone and rebuild community. They are reflective moments where communities come together to recognize common goals, purposes, strategies, histories, and approaches. It is not that these marches are anachronistic. In fact, they are often in response to some recent tragedy; yet they serve the function of inspiring hope, building solidarity, and restoring the capacity to overcome what may feel like overwhelming circumstances.

Galvanizing community is a common strategy of activist rhetoric. Lisa Corrigan analyzes this by considering how Malcolm X's legacy has been invoked by #BlackLivesMatter as protesters seek to raise consciousness while building coalitions. Using news accounts commemorating the anniversary of Malcolm's death this essay asks several questions: How and why does Malcolm continue to circulate in this political moment and how do his teachings resonate in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter consciousness campaign? Corrigan charts the political significance of invocations of Malcolm as rhetorical frames for understanding the man and his times as well as us in our milieu to understand how Malcolm's contribution to the #BLM has been minimized by their reformist agenda. Even still the reality of protest and death as entwined dynamics lives interstitially in the rhetoric of #BLM and modern protests.

Sam Perry's essay, “Barack Obama, Civil Mourning, and Prudence in Presidential Rhetoric,” is an analysis of one of the most paralyzing reminders of the American racial divide in the 21^st century—the death of Trayvon Martin. More than a simple retelling of the circumstances leading to Trayvon's death Perry decides instead to examine how past U.S. presidents have discursively inspired American citizens during times of mourning. This offers a nice segue into how President Obama responds to this as the first African American U.S. president. In unpacking the rhetoric of President Obama's rose garden speech, Perry reveals the subtleties that engage his audience to consider historical racial atrocities enacted against Black citizens of the United States. This article in some ways operates as a meditation on the current racial valance by invoking speeches from the current and previous presidents to carry the notion that one of the most significant roles of the president is to ensure constitutionality and equal access for all citizens so that all may enjoy their rights to a civic life promised in US founding documents.

Inspired by this focus on the presidency, Andre Johnson takes a different approach. He argues that the same speech in response to Trayvon Martin's death in addition to several other addresses by President Obama has come to be poignantly characterized by Ta-Nehisi Coates as the “scold of Black America.” More specifically Johnson maintains that President Obama shifts his tone to one that is prophetic when talking to fellow African Americans. He compares several instances punctuated by racist incident where African Americans were affected, such as after the Missouri Grand Jury decision to not indict Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown, and during the eulogy for the Emanuel Nine in Charleston, South Carolina. This essay is nuanced in that it attends to the backlash as well as the value in a political and rhetorical strategy to galvanize a sense of community.

Activists seeking political reform often look for tangible ways in which the civil rights struggle has led to equity, access, and inclusion. Maegan Parker Brooks' critical interpretive study of a Denver school district reveals the outcome of civil rights activism 20 years after the landmark Supreme Court public school desegregation ruling. Based on her analysis of a dozen interviews, she contends that the invisibility and arrogance of whiteness may be understood as White conceit and explores how its impacts policies affecting the underrepresented poor.

These five essays circulate ideas about how racism has permeated varying public discourses and how they are contrasted to contemporary discussions of race. The four forum contributors continue this trend. First, Freeman Hrabowski, president of University of Maryland Baltimore County and a widely recognized pubic intellectual, talks about his native city of Birmingham and his remembrances of civil rights struggles there. He discusses the strengths and limitations of a segregated city where Black people had their own homes and businesses but were not treated as equals, and ends with a note about success and hope for a better world. Widely acclaimed cultural critic Henry Giroux pens the next essay, and talks about the broken promises of equality. As usual, he eloquently exposes our current civic incapacity to apprehend and transcend the circuitry of racism and United States because of our collective and unspoken embrace of racist pedagogies and inflammatory rhetoric. Eric King Watts follows Giroux's essay by offering remarks regarding the politics of antiblackness. He begins with his observations pertaining to Chris Rock's hosting of the Academy Awards, then he talks about the notion of invisibility as it relates to seeing and being seen with President Obama and how this conspicuous invisibility overtakes our collective societal ability to proactively resist state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. With a steady focus on democracy he takes readers on a journey pointing out the discursive ruptures that have led to our current sociopolitical condition. Finally, Amber Johnson concludes the special issue with hope for how higher education institutions might deploy successful communication approaches as well as activist calls for equity and social justice.

This special issue is one way that we can begin to consider what it means to take a stand. We do this by commemorating civil rights activism, fighting for social justice imperatives wherever we are no matter whether it is a university, boardroom, living room, or other public space. We must march lest we forget the value of fighting to preserve our rights to freedom, justice, and equality, the cornerstones of American democracy.