FOR 16-YEAR-OLD Jasmyn Bowie, a schoolgirl who dreams one day of becoming a chemical engineer, the battle for equal rights that played out in her hometown of Selma, Alabama 50 years ago, this weekend should be a piece of distant history.
But as Selma’s elders gather to commemorate the events of America’s “Bloody Sunday” — the day on March 7 1965 when white police charged 600 activists with clubs and tear gas, provoking outrage and catalysing the civil rights struggle, she reveals a startling and disturbing fact.
After completing 12 years of education next year, Jasmyn will leave Selma High School having never shared a classroom with a white child. Five decades after her grandpar- ents’ generation risked their lives to bring change, Selma’s education system remains effectively segregated.
“It is just the way it is,” she tells The Sunday Telegraph with a shrug when asked why whites and blacks send their children to separate schools. “The white parents don’t want their kids going there, they go to private schools. It’s not them, it’s their parents. They are stuck in the past. They don’t like black people.”
American race relations have undeniably improved since the charge on demonstrators on Edmund Pettus bridge — a change most obviously symbolised by the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — but in many respects, time in Selma has stood still.
Superficially, the voting rights secured by Martin Luther King’s movement enabled black politicians to be elected to most of the city’s senior official positions, but it is a sign of how slowly things have changed in Selma that the first black mayor was not elected until 2000.
And while political power now rests ostensibly in the hands of black politicians, economic power remains overwhelmingly in the hands of white interests. Selma’s country club is yet to admit a single black member.
During several rounds of anniversary celebrations, Selma has put on a united face, with prominent black and white community leaders linking arms in a commemorative “unity” march, but behind the façade it is not hard to find the old divisions. In Selma’s atmospheric cemetery, filled with magnolias and moss-draped live oaks, Confederate flags flutter around a monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Civil War general and reputedly first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Although the city’s four colleges provide opportunities to students like Jasmyn beyond the dreams of the “freedom fighter” generation, the slow pace of progress remains painful for many.
Jasmyn’s great-aunt, Sadie Moss, a 73-year-old retired teacher, marched on Bloody Sunday as a young student. She says the failure to integrate Selma’s schools, and the apparent indifference of today’s students, represents a failure on both sides. “It’s dis- appointing, but many of the young don’t understand what we went through, what we suffered on that bridge and why we did it,” she says, “If they did, they would be more concerned about the fact that they never had a white student in their class.”
Political apathy among the young is not new — Mrs Moss’s field notes from 1963 show her struggling to drum up support from students for voter registration drives — but it reflects the reality that the deep racial undertow of America’s history is yet to be overcome.
The outcry last year over the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, did open some younger eyes to the struggle that the black community still faces, but Mrs Moss says the collective consciousness of her day is lacking.
“It brought it home to them a bit,” she says, “but you know it’s hard to get kids to watch the news these days.”
Jasmyn’s indifference to Selma’s de facto segregation could be taken as evidence of the beginnings of a more postracial society, if it weren’t so painfully clear how divided Selma remains.
Across town, at the Tabernacle of Praise church, Pastor Effell Williams tries to explain how difficult it has been for Selma to break free of the mutual suspicions that keep much of the black and white communities in separate orbits, attending their own schools, churches and community events.
Mr Williams, who was born poor but fought for an education, recalls arriving in Selma in 1983 with his wife and baby and moving into an all-white neighbourhood: within hours a note had been posted on his door warning the “n----- fam-
Jasmyn Bowie and her friend Brandon Crum. Both attend all-black high schools in Selma, as unofficial racial segregation continues
ily” to get out or be burned out. As recently as 2008, that same raw prejudice was still visible when Selma’s hitherto whiteonly Morgan Academy, named after John Tyler Morgan, another Confederate and KKK grand wizard, accepted its first black student and 500 parents complained about an attack on their “heritage”.
The prejudice was not universal — some white parents dissented — but the girl left the school after two years and the vocal minority made their feelings clear, spray-painting “go home” on her family’s front lawn.
In 1983, some white residents also came to apologise to Mr Williams for the abuse he received, and today Mr Williams has strong relations with the pastors of mainly white churches, and yet he says he cannot deny that there are still “two Selmas” — rich and poor, black and white.
“There are so many good people here, white and black. We’ve grown aeons since 1965 but even though there are no signs any more segregating black and white, we still act like they are there,” he says. “We stay in our own lanes and don’t realise there’s a whole other life out there. We just get comfortable. It’s not a fear of each other; it’s just a comfort in what we’re doing now.”
For Darrio Melton, a 36year-old state representative who is campaigning to raise the minimum wage, the shackles holding back young black people are first and foremost social and economic, not racial and political.
“Our kids are stuck in a time warp, but it’s only when they leave Selma that they see that in the rest of America and the world, it isn’t like that,” he says. “Fifty years ago the struggle was for political rights, but now the struggle is more economic; it’s about trying to give a poor black child the same opportunity as any other child, white or black.”
Since 1965, when Selma’s population was divided almost 50-50 between black and white, the town has suffered an inexorable economic decline, like many rural towns across America.
Today Selma is 80 per cent black because of the “white flight” that began with the closure of the Craig Air Force base in 1977. That has continued ever since as white people, who historically benefited from better education, left in search of better jobs.
Wayne Vardaman, the executive director of Selma’s Economic Development Authority, who is white, says he resents the media depiction of Selma as a backward, segregated town, arguing that white and black civil leaders are working hard together to improve things.
“Race relations have improved a lot since back then, we all work together well,” he says, preparing to welcome a party of business leaders to sign a bond for a new factory making wood pellets.
When the delegation of ruddy-cheeked businessmen arrives, there is only one black face among them.
The undeniable reality is that for those truly left behind — and in Selma and across America’s Deep South they are far more likely to be black than white — the fight for an equal chance in life that motivated the Bloody Sunday marchers 50 years ago is still very far from over.