The Shadow of Selma

The Shadow of Selma evaluates the 1965 civil rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, the historical memory of the campaign's marches, and the continuing relevance of and challenges to the Voting Rights Act. The contributors present Selma not just as a keystone event but, much like Ferguson today, as a transformative place: a supposedly unimportant location that became the focal point of epochal historical events. By shifting the focus from leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to the thousands of unheralded people who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge-and the networks that undergirded and opposed them-this innovative volume considers the campaign's long-term impact and its place in history. The volume recalls the historical currents that surrounded Selma, discussing grassroots activism, the role of President Lyndon B. Johnson during the struggle for the Voting Rights Act, and the political reaction to Selma at home and abroad. Using Ava DuVernay's 2014 Hollywood film as a stepping stone, the editors bring together various essays that address the ways media-from television and newspaper coverage to "race beat" journalism-represented and reconfigured Selma. The contributors underline the power of misrepresentation in shaping popular memory and in fueling a redemptive narrative that glosses over ongoing racial problems. Finally, the volume traces the fifty-year legacy of the Voting Rights Act. It reveals the many subtle and overt methods by which opponents of racial equality attempted to undo the act's provisions, with a particular focus on the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that eliminated sections of the act designed to prevent discrimination. Taken together, the essays urge readers not to be blind to forms of discrimination and injustice that continue to shape inequalities in the United States. They remind us that while today's obstacles to racial equality may look different from a literacy test or a grimfaced Alabama state trooper, they are no less real. Contributors: Alma Jean Billingslea Brown Ben Houston Peter Ling Mark McLay Tony Badger Clive Webb Aniko Bodroghkozy Mark Walmsley George Lewis Megan Hunt Devin Fergus Barbara Harris Combs Lynn Mie Itagaki

Author: Joe Street
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 03/09/2021
Pages: 310
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.01lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780813068442

About the Author
Joe Street, associate professor in history at Northumbria University, is the author of Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash and The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement. Henry Knight Lozano, senior lecturer in American history at the University of Exeter, is the author of Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869-1929 and California and Hawai'i Bound: U.S. Settler Colonialism and the Pacific West, 1848-1959.