Selma, 1965: Defining Democracy
Marcus Köttering
2015 saw the release of a stirring new film entitled ‘ Selma’, recounting the
greatest campaign of Martin Luther King’s career, which had taken place fifty
years previously. It is a film I would highly recommend, not only as it remains
faithful to historical fact, but also because it captures the struggle which so many
activists endured on their journey as followers of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. An
important question which historians must tackle is why King and his organisation,
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), decided to choose the
small Southern town of Selma, Alabama, to host one of the most crucial
campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement.
To begin with, for King, Selma was the
“symbol of white resistance”, situated at
the heart of the Southern United States
where the Movement had been
experiencing its strongest opposition.
This tension had existed in America
since the end of the Civil War and the
Emancipation Proclamation in 1863
which freed the vast majority of the
enslaved African-American population
of the United States. For many living in
the Southern States at the time, racial
segregation had formed a vital part of
the Southern ‘way of life’, and was legal
permitted under the Jim Crow laws, enforced since the 1890s. As the Civil Rights
Movement had been developing across the late 1950s and early 1960s with
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