Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History

7 Selling the Civil Rights Movement through Black Political Empowerment in Selma, Alabama

160 7 Selling the Civil Rights Movement through Black Political Empowerment in Selma, Alabama Glenn T. Eskew Perhaps no American city has touted its racist past more proudly than Selma, Alabama. With the slogan “From Civil War to Civil Rights and Beyond ,” this regional center of the Black Belt commodifies its contested history for heritage tourism purposes. In the process it leaves the consumer to figure out the greater implications of what the biracial city government presents as an ahistorical past devoid of context. A century separates the two most significant events in Selma’s history: the Battle of Selma in 1865 and the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965. Both events figure prominently in the tourism literature of the area, with images of the Greek Revival Sturdivant Hall juxtaposed against the civil rights battleground of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Together the two images do more than simply underscore a clever marketing strategy. Today both are scenes of popular reenactments that reflect contradictory ideologies. Many of the participants attending these events strongly associate with neo-Confederate or Afrocentric political perspectives. Members of the organizations hosting the reenactments engage in grassroots organizing to gain political power. Through the process of memorialization, the municipal government that promotes them both defuses the inherent political tensions. Consequently, the tourist is left to discern any real meaning to the message being packaged. Rather than one regional ideology inculcated through public ceremony like the white supremacy sold with the Lost Cause of yore, today there are many Glenn T. Eskew 161 perspectives presented in Selma’s marketplace of cultural heritage. The existence of such contradictory government-sponsored commemorations allows for diverse ideologies to compete within the realms of southern memory.1 An attractive antebellum town situated on a soapstone bluff above the Alabama River, Selma prospered in the early nineteenth century as a regional center of the cotton economy, with slave labor working plantations scattered across the rural hinterlands. The French explorer Sieur de Bienville had camped above the river when the Creek Indians occupied the area, but a century later American settlers had turned the site into a bustling village when visited by the Marquis de Lafayette. Land developer and future U.S. vice president William Rufus King named the town after a city in the Greek Poems of Ossian meaning throne or high seat, and Selma grew quickly in the antebellum period as planters bought thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves to work the rich, loamy soil of Alabama’s geologically distinct Black Belt. They shipped cotton by steamboat to Mobile and invested profits in railroad lines that cut up to Tennessee and down to the Gulf of Mexico as the town became a major transportation hub of the Deep South. Figure 7.1. In 1957 the Sturdivants purchased the Watts-Parkman-Gillman House as a showcase for their priceless collection of regional antiques and donated it all to Selma for use as the house museum, Sturdivant Hall. (Courtesy of Alabama Department of Tourism.) 162 Selling the Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama The prosperity attracted immigrants such as German settlers who arrived to smelt iron ore and build industry. Then secession and the outbreak of war led many of Selma’s men to volunteer for service in the Confederacy while others entered wartime production. The southern government used Selma’s industrial might to produce ironclad ships such as the CSS Tennessee and material for wartime such as the casting of cannon. During the war, ten thousand men, women, and children worked in the Confederate arsenal.2 Selma attracted the attention of the Union army, serving as a transportation center and locus for munitions. With the shifting of wartime fortunes for the Confederate States of America following the fall of Atlanta, Union raiders targeted Selma’s arsenal for destruction. Some nine thousand Federal forces under the command of General James H. Wilson marched on the industrial site in the spring of 1865. There the Union army met an exhausted ragtag bunch of some three thousand committed Confederates under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest who mounted a defense. The rearguard resistance failed as the North won the Battle of Selma on April 2, 1865, by trapping two-thirds of the southern force in the city. Locals call the fight the last battle of the Civil War and recognize that their community sustained more damage than any other location in...