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Remembering Selma and the fight against racism

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ON Sunday, America marked the 50th anniversary of the Selma protests at Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Edmund Pettus Bridge is one of the many landmarks that are a report of African-Americas long and continued fight to justice and equality in America.
The three Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 were part of the Selma Voting Rights Movement and led to the passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement.
Activists publicised the three protest marches to walk the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma to the Alabama state capital of Montgomery as showing the desire of African American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression.
The first march took place on March 7 1965, state troopers and county policemen attacked the unarmed marchers with clubs and tear gas.
The event gained the name ‘Bloody Sunday’. 
Law enforcers beat one of the demonstrators, Amelia Boynton unconscious; the media publicised a picture of her lying wounded on the bridge worldwide.
Now aged (104) and in a wheelchair, Amelia Boynton attended the Sunday commemorations at Edmund Pettus bridge.
But as thousands marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge this weekend, a small band of white people were less than a mile away, mourning the loss of the Confederacy and guarding a memorial to a white supremacist.
Live Oak cemetery is a burial site for Confederate soldiers in the civil war and contains the grave of Edmund Winston Pettus, the general – and member of the Ku Klux Klan – after whom the town’s bridge was named.
There has been a growing campaign to rename Selma’s bridge given its association with the Confederate south, and dozens of students had planned a peaceful march to the cemetery.
They quickly changed plans after discovering the neo-Confederates were waiting for them.
Selma is most famous for the violent assault on peaceful civil rights marchers on the town’s bridge in 1965.
But the Alabama town was also the site of another clash: a notorious civil war battle in which Union forces defeated the pro-slavery Confederate army.
The cemetery where General Pettus is buried also contains a memorial to the fallen soldiers, and a controversial monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the lieutenant general in the Confederate army and first Grand Wizard of the Klan.
Fifty years after the march across the bridge, Selma remains racially divided.
Schools are almost entirely segregated – as is the local country club which, still today, is said to maintain a white-only membership.
More over forms of racism are not far from the surface either.
Some of the black families in Selma opened their front doors this weekend to find letters containing white supremacist literature on their doorsteps, wrapped in rocks.
The Klan claimed responsibility for distributing 4 000 letters in Selma and Montgomery. 
The racial divisions in Selma are an illustration of how far America still has to go in erasing the racial divide.
America is going through a difficult period in race relations, following the recent high-profile killings by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in Staten Island and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, all black men.
This week, the Justice Department issued a scathing report detailing institutional racism in the Ferguson Police Department, while clearing former police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting last summer of the unarmed 18-year-old Brown, whose killing galvanised nationwide protests.
Brown’s family announced this week their intention to file a wrongful death lawsuit against Ferguson and Wilson.
On Friday March 6 2015 Tony T. Robinson Jr, a 19-year-old black man who appeared to be unarmed, was shot dead by a white police officer in Madison, Wisconsin, sparking protests there on Sunday.
President Barack Obama visited Selma on Saturday and declared the work of the US civil rights movement advanced, but unfinished in the face of ongoing racial tensions.
While the Selma protests were for voting rights, those rights have been eroded, especially for the African America man.
US Attorney General, Eric Holder, last year called for restoration of voting rights for felons who served their sentences, said the restriction has a disparate effect on African Americans. 
Close to if not over, 2,2 million black citizens — or nearly one in 13 African American adults — are banned from voting because of restrictive laws that forbid anyone who has been charged and imprisoned for felony crimes to vote even when they have served their sentences.
Given the disproportionate and discriminatory way black men are sent to prison in America, the move to deny them right to vote becomes a way of pushing them out of the political process and further condemning the black community to poverty.

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