Selma's Bloody Sunday: Protest, Voting Rights, and the Struggle for Racial Equality by Robert A. Pratt (review)

True to the Johns Hopkins University Press's Witness to History series, to which this slim volume belongs, Selma's Bloody Sunday: Protest, Voting Rights, and the Struggle for Racial Equalityby Robert A. Pratt gives readers a day-to-day chronology of the momentous events that culminated in the dramatic marches and harrowing violence that occurred in Selma, Alabama, in the spring of 1965. Pratt also provides historical context by tracing voting rights struggles from Reconstruction through attempts to subvert the Fifteenth Amendment and up to the current precarious status of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Pratt has provided readers with a compelling narrative that is a welcome addition to civil rights studies for both classrooms and a general audience.

Pratt is an excellent guide for this quick journey through a violent century of voting rights battles. As he did in his indispensable study on school desegregation in Richmond, Virginia, Pratt focuses on not just one witness to these events but a range of actors on the national and local scene, from President Lyndon B. Johnson to Selma schoolgirl Sheyann Webb. His emphasis on the role of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr. might raise objections from scholars who have emphasized the grassroots organizing by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that began well before 1965. However, Pratt does give attention to interorganizational tensions and, in the latter part of the book, documents the emerging leadership of Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power movement. Pratt also provides a moving description of the murders of Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, and Jonathan Daniels and analyzes why their deaths came to embody some of the tensions growing within the movement.

Perhaps because of the brevity of the volume, Pratt does not examine other aspects of the movement in general and Selma in particular that deserve more attention, including the role of gender. Amelia Boynton, who was a pioneer in registering black residents to vote and was beaten for doing so, gets considerable recognition, but Diane Nash of SNCC, who played a key role in identifying Selma as a voting rights battleground, is mostly left on the sidelines. Pratt also examines the controversy over King's decision to call off the second of the three Selma marches but perhaps underplays the anger it created among other activists, especially SNCC members.

Although Pratt provides figures on increases in black voter registration, he offers less coverage of black elected officials in the decades after Selma. Instead, he focuses on George Wallace's pivot toward black voters after 1965. Pratt provides an excellent analysis of one of the most momentous political effects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: thousands of white southerners' exodus from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. He brings this discussion into the contemporary era by noting that since the 1980s, court decisions have weakened the Voting Rights Act in crucial ways, including by shifting the burden of proof so that "the Justice Department would now have to prove that the states were still engaging in racially discriminatory voting practices rather than the states having to prove that they were not" (p. 125).

This volume is an outstanding introduction to the events that changed not only Selma and Alabama but also the entire nation. While space considerations may not have allowed Pratt to delve deeply into debates among civil rights scholars on questions of leadership, gender, organizational tensions, and political effects, he does reference these issues and offers an engaging narrative that will spur interested readers to find out more. Pratt has woven together a very readable chronology of dramatic events with attention to both the larger historical context and ongoing scholarly debates, a task many authors struggle to do...