Selma, Alabama

 
I paused at an intersection in downtown Selma looking for a street sign to see if I had come to Selma Avenue, the street where it’s Carnegie Library was located.  Before I could spot the sign a white-haired lady standing nearby talking to a friend said, “The Edmund Petus  Bridge is just ahead,” thinking I’d come to see the renowned bridge where a big showdown occurred in 1965 between the police and hundreds of blacks setting out on a March to the capital of Montgomery 54 miles away protesting the rigid restrictions that made it very difficult for blacks to vote.  

The bridge was on my itinerary, but I said, “I’m looking for the old Carnegie Library.”

She replied, “It’s just down the street.  That’s where the first meeting of suffragettes in the state took place.”  Whether she just coincidentally linked the Carnegie to voting rights, as is the Edmund Petus Bridge, or was making a point of it, I know not.  It’s a sad fact that blacks were given the right to vote before women, though once women were given the right they didn’t have to fight to realize it as did blacks.

She added that the Carnegie is now the chamber of commerce and then asked how far I had come and how many Carnegies I’d seen and if I was on Instagram.  I told her I had a blog and could be found by Googling George the Cyclist.”

I told them I’d just seen the Carnegie at Judson College in Marion, thirty miles away.

“We’re afraid the college is going to close down,” she said.  

“There is some hope it can be saved,” I said, “As a security guard there told me they had an open house yesterday that fifty prospective students attended.” 

It’s a small all-women Baptist College with a pre-Covid enrollment of just 260 students.  It was founded in 1848, named for the first American woman missionary to Burma.  It was one of the first colleges for women in the US.  I thought I had been to the first earlier in the trip in Columbus, Mississippi (The Mississippi University for Women in Columbus).  That had been founded in 1884, making it the first in the public sector, while Judson was in the private sector.

Judsen’s Carnegie gave way to a new library in 1962.  The Carnegie is now a museum and office building, and has been renamed A. Howard Bean Hall, though its Carnegie origins are not forgotten.

Selma’s Carnegie had nothing on its exterior acknowledging its heritage, though any Carnegie aficionado would recognize its distinguishing features. It hasn’t been marred by any additions, just an entry ramp for the handicapped on its backside.

As I approached the Petus bridge over the Alabama River I expected a series of plaques detailing its place in history.  The first plaque I came to three blocks away was actually devoted to Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet who was a popular figure in ‘60s counterculture.  It was in front of a building that served as his photography studio from 1912 to 1923. He lived from 1877 to 1945 and is considered the father of the New Age movement as many of the renditions he gave when in a trance related to reincarnation and Atlantis.  The Chicago Public Library has nearly one hundred books by and about him.

There were no plaques relating to the Bridge on the city side.  They were all across the river in a small Civil Rights Memorial Park across from a Voting Rights Museum. 

One of the cluster of plaques revealed the bridge was named for a leader of the KKK without also mentioning that he’d been a Confederate general and US Senator. There have been attempts to rename the bridge for the recently deceased Georgia congressman John Lewis, who was a leader of the March, but all have failed so far, though a photograph of the marchers from the time, including Lewis, has altered the name. 

I had planned to take a two-lane secondary road to Montgomery, but the March followed what is now a four-lane divided Highway designated as an official Historic Route.  I felt obligated to follow that.  The marchers took five days to cover the fifty-four  miles and its numbers grew to 25,000 by the end, including a fourteen-year old neighbor and classmate of mine from Glenview and his mother, Doris Conant, who was a long-time member of the board of directors of Facets Multimedia.  My friend Howie, who was a tennis star and played on the same championship intramural basketball team that I captained, wasn’t very political, but his mother certainly was.  I had a hard time imagining what was going though his mind over fifty years ago while he walked the route I was bicycling. 

There were historical markers indicating where the group, led by Martin Luther King, camped, and there was a huge National Park Interpretative Center at around the halfway point. 

The South has done little to suppress its sordid past.  Among the plaques at the Memorial Park was one devoted to lynchings in Selma.

 In Marion, where Judsen College is, a plaque by the courthouse recounted the murder of a local 26-year old black that instigated the March to Selma.