OPINION:
When President Obama marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma he had Republican company. The casual reader/viewer might not know that, because in the wake of an occasion that the president transformed into a Democratic campaign rally some of the Republicans who joined him were relegated to the margins, sometimes even cut out of the photographs.
Making the Republicans visible conflicts with the contemporary narrative that the Grand Old Party is bad and repentant, and it’s the Democrats who are heir to the work of the abolitionists, and to this day are always on the scout to do something for the forgotten man.
Certain conservatives scolded House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for not joining the party in Selma. But they rightly calculated that they would have only been stage decoration for the president, who only grudgingly conceded how far the nation has come since events at Selma, and who used the occasion to link snarling police dogs and billy clubs to the push for laws to protect the integrity of elections by requiring voters to show a valid photo-ID card. Some of the Democrats, particularly from Mr. Obama’s adopted home state, clearly don’t want to give up campaigning in the graveyard.
Such a photo-ID requirement is very different from imposing a literacy test or a poll tax, and to make that link distorts the civil rights revolution. It’s an attempt to make the distortion fit the political realignment of modern America. There’s a reluctance to recognize the aggressive support of Republicans like Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen, the leader of the Republican minority of that distant day, and without whose support there would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964. Indeed, in large measure those early civil rights acts were the work of Republicans, enacted over the fierce resistance of Democrats. The president is fond of citing ancient history, such as his attempt to link Christians with terrorism through recalling the Crusades of the 14th century. But he should remember that the civil rights sins of his party are not quite that old.
This first of three marches from Selma to Montgomery provided the needed impetus to push the legislation through Congress, and only against the police dogs, tear gas and billy clubs dispatched by the order of George C. Wallace, the Democratic governor who would later win several Democratic presidential primaries in states of both the North and South. It was a pivotal moment in the history of the nation.
You probably couldn’t expect the president to offer a history lesson, however such might be needed, at a campaign rally. But if he had, he could have apologized for his party’s role in preserving the slavery introduced by Yankees, and in creating and preserving the Jim Crow laws that enforced legal segregation for decades after the end of the Civil War.
There was irony aplenty this year at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The marchers included not only rank-and-file Republicans, but George W. Bush, the former president, and Laura Bush, the former first lady. (Their figures and faces were cropped out of the front-page photograph in The New York Times.) America is no exception to the indictments of history that have fallen on every nation, but no nation in history has done more to redeem its sins. The president might reflect on this when he sinks into a sour reverie.
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