uwmspeccoll: Milestone Monday – The Selma MarchOn this day, March 21, in 1965 Dr. Martin Luthe
uwmspeccoll: Milestone Monday – The Selma MarchOn this day, March 21, in 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands on a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in protest of the segregationist repression of Black American’s constitutional right to vote. To commemorate this occasion, we share photographer and book artist Clifton Meador’s 1996 work Long Slow March, published by The Center for Editions at Purchase College in Purchase, NY. Meador drew inspiration from the typographic form of the polyglot bible, presenting opposing narratives side by side. Writing about the work in the Journal of Artists’ Books (2012), Meador comments, “The Selma march (itself a narrative structure) forms the backbone of the book; the limbs of the book (primary source texts and photomontage of slavery and the civil rights struggle) hang on either side of it.”The march that began on March 21 and ended with 25,000 people gathering on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol Building was the third, and finally successful, attempt. The first attempt, led by John Lewis and the Reverend Hosea Williams was curtailed by the brutal response of Alabama State Troopers. After reaching the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the Troopers crackdown, King turned the marchers back to Selma after being privately urged by President Johnson’s representative, Florida governor LeRoy Collins, to obey the temporary injunction placed on the marchers by U.S. District Court Judge Frank Minis Johnson. After receiving a commitment from the federal government to back the marchers, Judge Johnson ruled in favor of the protesters and a third march was planned for the following Sunday. This time, they would reach Montgomery, where King would give his “How Long, Not Long,” speech. “The battle is in our hands. And we can answer with creative nonviolence to call to higher ground to which the new directions of our struggle summons us. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that leads us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. But we must keep going.” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. March 25, 1965View more Milestone Monday posts here.-Olivia, Special Collections graduate intern -- source link