SELMA, Ala.- Like so many other cities in the Black Belt, Selma is a shell of rusting steel and crumbling brick and mortar. Down by the Edmond Pettus bridge, hollowed out hulks loom over the Alabama river like rotting teeth guarding the mouth of a ghost town. It wasn't always like this.
So much here belies its rich and historic past, first as home to Alabama's wealthy slave-era cotton kings, later as an important staging ground for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
But after the marchers had gone and the cameras disappeared, and a handful of the rights were won, so many of the deeper ideals remained unrealized here. In 1977, Craig Air Force base left town like so many other employers.
Practically all that's left today is a paper factory, a re-segregated public school system and a political culture that remains broken along racial lines. Some residents say remnants of Selma's segregationist past linger on the lips of politicians who are race baiting for votes.
The city has turned to tourism for economic stability, hoping to capitalize on its role as a cog in the movement and its connection to Bloody Sunday, when on March 7, 1965, armed officers brutally attacked peaceful protesters attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights.
But economic energy is in low supply here -- the city's main streets are lined with boarded up or abandoned buildings, and weathered old storefronts leaving little to draw in visitors.
The black and white sections of town are starkly different, the white side boasting large antebellum homes with massive columns and wrap-around front porches, some with rocking chairs, many others abandoned and over-grown.
"How's that saying go? The more things change the more they stay the same," said Joyce O'Neal, the church historian at Brown Memorial A.M.E Church in Selma, where mass meetings were held during the Civil Rights era.
About an hour before 11 a.m. service on Sunday, with the first three rows filled with college students and a group of original
Freedom Riders, O'Neal talked of Selma's triumphs and tragedies, and the role of the church in the
Civil Rights Movement.
"Selma came kicking and screaming into a new way of life. But it still has that subtle racism," she said. "That's not to say that things aren't a whole lot better -- things that we can do, things that we can participate in, careers that you can have," she said. "But now that I'm here and retired, I can still see some of the racism, especially with the schools."
When segregation of the public schools began to unravel in the 1960s, whites simply took their children out of the school systems and enrolled them in what some call "seg academies," private academies founded to keep segregation in tact.
"The whites say if we can't control it, then we don't want anything to do with it," said Aubrey Larkin, a trustee on the
Brown Chapel board.
In 1965 protesters gathered at the Brown Chapel and prayed before setting out on a planned march to the state capital. Then they walked about six blocks from the church to the foot of the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where Congressman and original Freedom Rider
John Lewis, alongside nearly 600 protesters, faced off with police officers who had been ordered to disrupt their march. Lewis and the marchers were beaten bloody, with the future congressman suffering a fractured skull.
White onlookers lined the side of the road and cheered on the attackers. The incident came to be known as Bloody Sunday, and Selma and the bridge are forever tied to it.
On this Sunday morning in 2011, with a cool wind whipping off the river, old and new Freedom Riders gathered at the foot of the Edmund Pettis. We lined up two-by-two and walked silently over the bridge together, as the relics of Selma's historic past loomed over us ever so humbly.
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