The Fight for Equality Continues...

This past Friday through tear filled eyes I viewed the showing of the movie 'Selma,' released in time for Martin Luther King's birthday.  The 1965 nonviolent march organized by the Southern Leadership's Christian Conference was between Selma and Montgomery, ending at the capitol to demand the right to register to vote for blacks. What one witnessed on the screen was not fiction but the historical depiction of the violent resistance the protesters were met with by not only white community members with bats and sticks wound with barbed wire but state troopers with batons, with some on horseback with whips, (throwback of masters whipping their slaves), humanity at their worst. 

This Freedom March was pivotal in the Civil Rights movement as our nation saw firsthand via television and newspaper reporting the inequality and racism.   

In 1954 Brown vs The Board of Education had declared segregated schools unconstitutional. Having been schooled in the South but not quite old enough for the 1957 rearing of the ugly heads of hatred of the initial enforcement of desegregation of   Little Rock's Central High School, 9 black students were met with taunting, spitting and racial slurs by hostile white parents, students, community members and hate groups. Governor Faubus had deployed the National Guard not just for crowd control but to prevent the Little Rock Nine from entering the school.  It must have been terrifying. After that initial attempt named the Little Rock Crisis, President Eisenhower ordered Governor Faubus to insure the 9 safety and entrance into Central.

It wasn't until the 1970's that bussing from black neighborhoods occurred at my Little Rock high school on the other side of town.  Fast forward to the 1990's when my children attended Magnet Schools in Little Rock which were formed for the purpose of creating equal education. It was the white students who were bussed this time to the black neighborhoods to schools were more monies were allotted per student at schools for International Global Studies & Languages, Science & Math/ Arts Magnet. Actually during the time my kids were in school, the mandated desegregation order had ended.

Tonight Ruby Bridges, one of the  first 4 black children in New Orleans to desegregate an all white elementary school will speak in honor of a community celebration in honor of Martin Luther King's Birthday.  

TBC... 

 Link: Little Rock Nine 50 th anniversary