October 10: HOPE

Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. About 600 marchers from Selma, AL, on their way to Montgomery to protest racial inequity and discrimination, were met by a cordon of white troopers and deputies, who attacked them and charged them on horseback. Today, 65 years later, these things are happening again.

But there is still hope. Look at that bridge. Do you even know who Edmund Pettus was, without looking him up? That’s the source of hope: that we can remember the name not as a traitor to his country and a slaver, celebrated by a white supremacist state, but as a place where people began to see the brutality and injustice of white supremacy, and be moved to do something about it.

That said, I’m all for changing the name of this bridge to the John Lewis Bridge.