Renaming Edmund Pettus Bridge a divisive issue

Some want it to honor John Lewis; some who bled with him disagree

Lynda Lowery was 14 when she and hundreds of civil rights marchers were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, an event known as “Bloody Sunday.” She got seven stitches over her right eye and 28 on the back of her head.

The memories of the emergency room – the needle, a nurse telling her many of the injured were treated without anesthesia – came back to her recently.

“After all these years, the bridge, Bloody Sunday and so forth brings back bad memories,” Lowery, a Selma resident, said Saturday.

Lowery wept Friday evening, learning of the death of U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whose skull was cracked on the bridge that day. But she opposes efforts to name the bridge after him.

“I left my blood and tears in the cement of that bridge,” she said. “So did John. So did a lot of other people … if we’re going to try to fix things that are broken, then fix the things that are broken.”

Lewis’ death brought new attention to efforts to rename the Selma bridge that was the stage for a turning point in the civil rights movement. Leaders of those efforts stressed that any decision to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate general, need to be left to the people of Selma.

“We’re working with the community on the ground to foster discussion,” said Michael Starr Hopkins, a political consultant who organized a petition drive to place Lewis’ name on the bridge.

From a strict legal standpoint, renaming the bridge would be difficult. In 2017, the state Legislature passed the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which makes it all but impossible for governments to rename, alter or remove monuments or memorial structures 40 years old or older. The Legislature would have to repeal the law or pass a separate bill addressing the name of the bridge.

In Selma, whose population is 82% Black, renaming the bridge has long been a divisive idea. Few show any interest in defending Pettus, a white supremacist among the late 19th-century Bourbon Democrats who robbed Black Alabamians of their civil and voting rights through fraud and violence.

Lowery and some other veterans of the march expressed unease about renaming the bridge. Some said its civil rights legacy overshadows any honors intended for Pettus.

“What happened on that bridge changed the whole meaning of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, of Edmund Pettus, to me,” Jo Ann Bland, Lowery’s sister who marched on Bloody Sunday in 1965, told The Associated Press this month. “I bet he’s rolling in his grave every time we walk across that bridge.”

Selma commemorates Bloody Sunday every year with an event known as the Bridge Crossing Jubilee.