by Joy-Ann Reid
The Americans who crossed this bridge, they were not physically imposing. They gave courage to millions. They held no elected office. But they led a nation. They marched as Americans who had endured hundreds of years of brutal violence, countless daily indignities—but they didn’t seek special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them almost a century before.
As we commemorate their achievement, we are well-served to remember that at the time of the marches, many in power condemned rather than praised them. Back then, they were called communists, or half-breeds, or outside agitators, sexual and moral degenerates, and worse—they were called everything but the name their parents gave them. Their faith was questioned. Their lives were threatened. Their patriotism challenged. And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place? What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people—unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many, coming together to shape their country’s course? What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?
Obama acknowledged that the work of America is unfinished, that “the march is not yet over.” As a small protest broke out among the crowd, led by demonstrators from Ferguson, he also acknowledged two just-released Justice Department reports. Though one report stated there was insufficient evidence to charge the now former officer Darren Wilson with civil rights violations in killing Michael Brown, noting there was inconsistent and insufficient evidence to prove the “hands-up” narrative of Brown’s killing that had so animated protesters nationwide, the second report, on the patterns and practices of Wilson’s former department, summarily condemned the long-standing city and municipal court–sanctioned practice in Ferguson of profiting off the systematic targeting of black residents for ticketing and fines and arrest. Such a practice had turned the relationship with police into one in which African American citizens were little more than ridiculed and disrespected sources of income for the city of Ferguson.
“Just this week, I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country,” Obama said. “And I understood the question; the report’s narrative was sadly familiar. It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the civil rights movement. But I rejected the notion that nothing’s changed. What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic. It’s no longer sanctioned by law or by custom. And before the civil rights movement, it most surely was.
“We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America,” the president said. “If you think nothing’s changed in the past fifty years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s.”
The speech drew broad praise from historians and writers and even some Obama foes. (After pointing to “danger signs” and “wrongful interpretations of the American experiment,” National Review’s Quin Hillyer admitted to its beautiful crafting, declaring the speech to be “for anyone who appreciates good writing . . . a masterpiece.”) Charles Blow, one of five African American writers invited to travel with the president, his family, and members of his cabinet, including Valerie Jarrett, to Selma, noted in the New York Times afterward that Shelby County, whose lawsuit to overturn the preclearance requirement to change its voting laws had brought down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, was just an hour north of where the president spoke. Among those gathered at the base of the bridge, Blow wrote, there was, beyond the raw emotion of watching a black man embody the nation’s highest office and speak to its highest principles, a sense of frustration in the air at what felt like a national retrogression; it was “a pessimism about a present and future riven by worsening racial understanding and interplay.”
Still, the president seemed, at last, to have sounded the right notes.
Among those who were not in Selma were Bill and Hillary Clinton, who spent the weekend in Miami raising funds for the Clinton Global Initiative. The organizers of the competing Saturday and Sunday commemorations extended invitations to all of the living former presidents and their families, but the Clintons, along with Jimmy Carter, cited prior commitments, and former president George H. W. Bush was absent due to his health. And while local organizers in Selma had warm feelings toward the Clintons, who in the past had provided financial support for the annual pilgrimage to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, their absence drew notice from the national media, as did that of the panoply of potential Republican candidates for president.
One black writer, Michael H. Cottman, noted on Black America Web, an online outlet of Tom Joyner and other popular black radio hosts, that the Clintons had allied themselves closely with black America. Bill Clinton had been “affectionately known as America’s ‘first black president’ before Obama actually filled that role.” Hillary Clinton was poised to run for president, a prospect for which she would need substantial black turnout and support. Given all that, “it would only seem prudent” for Hillary “to show up in Selma, sit on the stage with the other dignitaries, and show her support for civil rights legislation and restoring the Voting Rights Act.”
Some in the media speculated that the Clintons stayed away from Selma to avoid the inevitable questions about 2016, given the fact that the last time they and Barack Obama marched in Selma together was in 2007, when Hillary and Obama were competitors in the Democratic primary. Others cited the rift between John Lewis and local organizers, and the Clintons’ desire to not get between friends; they remained close both to Lewis and to state senator Hank Sanders and his wife, Rose, the longtime organizers of the local yearly commemoration. Two weeks before the celebration, Bill Clinton personally telephoned Rose Sanders to explain his coming absence due to the couple’s commitment in Miami, which he said was scheduled before he knew the date—Saturday or Sunday—when the commemoration would take place.
The Clintons weren’t silent on Selma. From Miami on Saturday, the former secretary of state joined in the praise of President Obama’s “superb speech,” and called on the country to keep up the fight, for voting rights, for LGBT rights, and for women’s equality. It was a signal that the coming Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would likely make gender the next great sociopolitical battleground, much as the enthusiasm for African American advancement had animated Barack Obama’s victory over her in 2008. For his part, Bill Clinton shared on social media a video, produced by his foundation, in which he recalled growing up in the segregated South and “witnessing firsthand, the degrading consequences of segregation”; the former president lauded the events in Selma that “fifty years ago, became one of the most profound appeals to the founding principles and enduring conscience of our nation.” In the video, Clinton spoke of the many marchers from 1965 who remained alive and in the struggle for civil rights, citing just three by name: “my friends John Lewis, and Hank and Rose Sanders,” a pointed reference to the leading antagonists of Selma in 2015.
On Sunday, with the first family back in Washington along with most of the congressional delegation, it was the local Selma community’s turn to commemorate its place in history, fifty years on, and to stage its own mass reenactment of the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Several Obama cabinet secretaries arrived at historic Brown Chapel AME Church, where the Bloody Sunday march was planned and launched, including Jeh Johnson, the country’s African American director of homeland security. Then the church erupted in a standing ovation as Eric Holder entered, and he later rose to speak. Seated beside Holder and his wife was Loretta Lynch, who was poised to become Holder’s successo
r and the first African American woman to be attorney general of the United States, but who was in the midst of the longest delay for confirmation vote ever imposed on an attorney general nominee by the Senate; more than four months had passed since the president had nominated her. On the dais were Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young, the heads of the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Rev. Sharpton, and Martin Luther King III. Seated inside the packed sanctuary were many who had marched fifty years before.
When it was his turn to speak, King, known as “MLK III” to his friends and associates, told the congregation it was no time to celebrate, with access to the ballot under fire in multiple states. He said his father would want them to keep marching. Sharpton closed the service with a fiery sermon, telling the cheering congregation and those gathered outside the church watching on a giant screen that “people fought and bled and died for our voting rights, and we didn’t come to Selma to give ’em back!” Members of Congress were vowing to return to Washington filled with the spirit of Selma, to push their Republican colleagues to restore the Voting Rights Act. But few believed House Speaker John Boehner or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would prioritize it. Even as a handful of Republicans publicly declared their support, a bill to restore Section 4 of the act stood languishing in the House. Even if it was ultimately brought forward, civil rights leaders like Wade Henderson and Sherrilyn Ifill, leader of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, openly worried that it would be festooned with hated provisions like a national version of voter ID.
A CNN poll released on March 6 found that while three-quarters of African Americans believed the act was still necessary to secure the right to vote (a figure that rose to 82 percent for blacks in the South), just 48 percent of whites agreed. In that poll, 54 percent of black respondents, versus just 19 percent of white ones, said they believed black Americans were not given an equal chance to land jobs for which they were qualified. Three-quarters of blacks versus 42 percent of whites felt the criminal justice system favors white Americans. Forty-five percent of white respondents and 26 percent of blacks believed race relations had gotten worse during the Obama era, with just 15 percent overall, and just 20 percent of Democrats, believing they’d gotten better.
Given that polarized atmosphere, and with the headwinds of reflexive loathing battering him relentlessly from the Right, it remained to be seen whether Barack Obama, in his final two years in office, could marshal the national and congressional will, and summon the country’s moral courage, to make Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson’s triumph whole again; to “use the inspiration of Selma” to press for criminal justice reform and “spark a conversation around the continuing legacies in Jim Crow that led to impoverished and isolated communities,” as he told the group of black journalists aboard Air Force One. It remained to be seen how hard he planned to try.
To do so would risk reopening the racial wounds that were exposed every time this president stepped into the chasm of America’s racial history and present condition.
Six years into his presidency, and in the third jubilee year of the civil rights movement, whose pivotal years between 1963 and 1965 produced such monumental change, Barack Obama was presiding over a nation still strongly divided by region, political tribe, and race. He was preparing to bequeath to his Democratic successor—in all likelihood, Hillary Clinton—a party that in fifty years had gone from exclusionary on matters of race to embodying the nation’s diverse future. He would bequeath to his successor in the White House a country that had a choice: to push further into the breach and fully confront its racial demons at last, so that a future black or brown or Asian president could speak freely about America’s interracial triumphs and its challenges, or to retreat into a state of benign forgetfulness and conscious “unknowing,” while a thousand Fergusons burn beneath the surface.
Epilogue
EVEN BEFORE THE CANDIDATE ANNOUNCED SHE WAS RUNNING, the campaign chose as its headquarters One Pierrepont Plaza in Brooklyn Heights, a bustling, downtown neighborhood that spoke to their determination to appeal to a modern, young electorate and to attract a dynamic team.
The offices were in biking distance of Manhattan and a short walk from the upscale bars and hipster cafes whose presence, along with a seemingly endless expanse of high-rise apartment and condo buildings, was part of Brooklyn’s transformation from the troubled, ethnically segregated borough of the 1970s and ’80s to the emblem of New York City’s quickly gentrifying melting pot.
Hillary Clinton’s name may have been vintage, but her campaign was determined not to be. A campaign memo leaked ahead of the announcement laid out the themes: The campaign would be “diverse, disciplined, and humble.” Early hires were young, heavily female, drawn from Google, EMILY’s List, and the previous Clinton, Obama, and Howard Dean campaigns. They included the architect of Michelle Obama’s media tour through the living rooms of American women, from her much-publicized trips to Target to her comedic “mom dancing” skits with The Tonight Show’s host, Jimmy Fallon.
The official moniker of the campaign echoed Obama’s 2008 run. It would be called “Hillary for America,” and would seek to put less emphasis on the candidate and her sometimes tortured, quarter-century-long dance with the country and the media, and attempt to turn the focus outward, to Hillary’s chosen bedrock issue: economic inequality. Campaign manager Robby Mook—poised to become the first openly gay manager of a presidential campaign and at thirty-five already a veteran of the 2004 Howard Dean and 2008 Hillary Clinton campaigns, as well as the successful gubernatorial bid of longtime Clinton friend and fundraiser Terry McAuliffe in Virginia—enjoined his staff to “take nothing for granted. . . . We are humble. . . . We are never afraid to lose, we always out-compete and fight for every vote we can win. We know this campaign will be won on the ground, in states.”
Hillary made her formal announcement on April 12, 2015, via Twitter—a medium she has adapted to with surprising wit and ease. And then the campaign hit the road, literally, driving in a van dubbed the “Scooby-mobile,” on a road trip from New York to Iowa. She traveled along Route 80 through Pennsylvania and Ohio to Iowa, a place where her staff hoped to bury the ghosts of her defeat there in 2008 and to start anew. Iowa was the first leg of the familiar Hillary Clinton operation: a listening tour, which would take the campaign in its early weeks along the golden primary and caucus trail, to New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. A listening tour was how she’d launched her successful Senate bid in New York in 2000, at a time when she was a soon-to-be former First Lady in the midst of rebranding and a new transplant from Washington, D.C., by way of Arkansas, by way of Illinois.
Now the Clintons were New Yorkers, ensconced in offices in Harlem, midtown, and Brooklyn, with a home in the town of Chappaqua. It seemed fitting that Hillary would base her presidential campaign in the state that had embraced her and her family, and where her daughter and granddaughter lived, with Chelsea working at the family’s nonprofit enterprises, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.
Around the country, Hillary Clinton’s friends and supporters had awaited the formal announcement of her campaign with nervous anticipation. Her second try for the White House had seemed a certainty to many of them from the moment she had lost the 2008 Democratic primary to Barack Obama, taking the shattered dreams of millions of women with her.
“I’m hopeful that a new Clinton era will look a lot like the old Clinton era,” said Weldon Latham, an African American business leader and longtime friend of the Clintons, who recalled the Bill Clinton administration as an era of inclusion. “As an African American, I can say that I thought it was the best period of time I can remember in America, when we had a president who openly spoke about the advantages of diversity and was trying to move everybody up; moving people in poverty up to the middle class, and [moving] people in the middle class all the way up to being the millionaires. The Clinton years were some of the best years in my lifetime.”
That Hillary would try aga
in had a feeling of certainty to it, despite the seemingly endless delays in the formal announcement. People who had been allies of the Clintons from the beginning believed that even accepting the role of secretary of state in the Obama administration was a step along the path and was what one supporter called “a quid pro quo,” adding: “I think it was pretty common knowledge among Hillary people that it was. And at that point everyone was just thinking, ‘Well, she’s gonna be secretary of state and then she’s gonna be president.’ ”
The birth of Chelsea’s daughter in September 2014 was the lone event that friends and longtime observers surmised could push Hillary off the road to the presidency. Instead, she began incorporating the baby into her stump speeches, often telling audiences during her increasingly frequent speaking events that as a newly minted grandmother, she wanted to see to it that her granddaughter grew up in the kind of America where women enjoyed full equality. Two days before the campaign announcement, the scrupulously private Chelsea appeared on the cover of Elle, opening up to the magazine about a pair of topics that would be highly germane to her mother’s campaign: motherhood and women’s rights.
The message was deliberate: Women’s rights and ambitions were to be a touchstone of Hillary’s candidacy this time, much the way the unfulfilled hopes of African Americans, and the dreams of many white Americans for cross-racial unity, were the currency of the Obama campaign in 2008. Hillary and her team had learned the lesson from the Obama victory over what had seemed like an inevitable Clinton romp to the nomination: that you cannot inspire a crucial base indirectly. You have to make a direct appeal to their hearts, minds, and souls.
In 2008, she had sought to make her gender incidental to her image as a strong leader and a credible commander in chief. But for 2016, Hillary would go to the well of dreams, and women would be objects of her embrace. A Gallup poll released on March 21 found that the number-one selling proposition among would-be voters for a potential Hillary Clinton presidency was her status as a potential first female president, with twice as many (18 percent) choosing that answer over her experience and foreign policy acumen (9 percent).