March 25, 2015
Page 9
Career & Education
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O PINION
Staying on the March Right Now
Stand up to
those wanting
to turn back the
clock
by M arian
W right
e delMan
Fifty years
ago I traveled
from Missis-
sippi to Sel-
ma, Ala. to join Dr. Martin Lu-
ther King Jr. and thousands of
fellow citizens marching the 54
miles to the steps of the state’s
capitol in Montgomery. Millions
of Americans now know about
this march thanks to the movie
Selma and the recent 50th anni-
versary celebration.
Selma was the site of a cou-
rageous voting rights campaign
by black citizens which was met
by brutal Southern Jim Crow
law enforcement and citizen vi-
olence. The nation was shocked
two weeks earlier when John
Lewis and Rev. Hosea Williams
set out on a nonviolent march
with a group of 600 people to-
ward Montgomery to demand
their right to vote and were bru-
tally attacked by lawless state and
local law enforcement officials at
the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The televised images of
“Bloody Sunday” and the sav-
age beatings of the march-
ers—including
Congressman
Lewis whose skull was frac-
tured—were a pivotal moment
in the Civil Rights Movement
and in America’s struggle to
become America. It provoked
the thousands of us (ultimate-
ly about 25,000) who came
together later to finish the
march, safer thanks to Feder-
al District Court Judge Frank
M. Johnson Jr.’s order that
we had a right to peaceful
protest and with National Guard
protection. And we were buoyed
by President Johnson’s March
15, 1965 address calling on Con-
gress to pass what became the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In that speech—“The Ameri-
can Promise”—President John-
son said: “This was the first na-
tion in the history of the world to
be founded with a purpose. The
great phrases of that purpose still
sound in every American heart,
North and South: ‘All men are
created equal’—‘government by
consent of the governed’—‘give
me liberty or give me death’...
Those words are a promise to
every citizen that he shall share
in the dignity of man... To apply
any other test—to deny a man
his hopes because of his color or
race, his religion or the place of
his birth—is not only to do injus-
tice, it is to deny America and to
dishonor the dead who gave their
lives for American freedom”
Fifty years later, speaking at
the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Pres-
ident Obama echoed the same
themes: “[Selma is] the manifes-
tation of a creed written into our
founding documents... These are
not just words. They’re a living
thing, a call to action, a road-
map for citizenship and an insis-
tence in the capacity of free men
and women to shape our own
destiny.”
The first Selma march was
the Selma marches we are wit-
nessing the resurgence of overt
law enforcement brutality and
injustice in Ferguson, Cleve-
land, New York City, and else-
where, reminding us how far we
still have to go. The continuing
protests against unequal justice
under the law by those enjoined
to protect all of us and all of our
children after the deaths of teen-
ager Michael Brown, 12-year-
old Tamir Rice, and others are
a wake-up call about the deeply
embedded systemic racism still
The televised images of “Bloody Sunday”
and the savage beatings of the marchers—in-
cluding Congressman Lewis whose skull was
fractured—were a pivotal moment in the Civil
Rights Movement...
planned not only to gain the
right to vote but to protest the
tragic death of Jimmie Lee Jack-
son, a 26-year-old black church
deacon and military veteran
killed in Marion, Ala. when he,
his mother, sister, and 82-year-
old grandfather attended an-
other nonviolent voting rights
demonstration where marchers
were brutally attacked by racist
Alabama law enforcement offi-
cials who broke it up. Jackson
was shot and beaten trying to
shield his mother from a police
nightstick. What a terrible irony
that in this year of celebration of
alive in America. Each of us has
a responsibility to root it out and
stop it in its tracks.
Each American must remem-
ber and help America remember
that the fellowship of human be-
ings is more important than the
fellowship of race and class and
gender in a democratic society.
Each of us has a personal re-
sponsibility to be decent and fair
and insist that others be so in our
presence. Don’t tell, laugh at, or
tolerate racial, ethnic, religious,
or gender jokes—or any prac-
tices intended to demean rather
than enhance another human be-
ing. Walk away from them. Stare
them down. Make them unac-
ceptable in our presence and in
our institutions.
Through daily moral con-
sciousness each of us has a re-
sponsibility to counter the pro-
liferating voices of racial and
moral and ethnic and religious
division that are regaining re-
spectability over our land. Let’s
face up to rather than ignore our
growing racial problems which
are America’s historical and
future Achilles’ heel unless ad-
dressed firmly and courageously.
And let us all stand up right
now to all those in our Con-
gress, statehouses, and across
our country who are trying to
take away and suppress the right
to vote and who are refusing to
honor the sacrifice of all those
who died to gain this fundamen-
tal American right. Shame on
them and shame on us if we don’t
act to insist that Congress renew
the Voting Rights Act without a
minute’s more delay. And shame
on us if we do not stand up to all
those who seek to turn the clock
of racial progress backwards by
denying equal justice under the
law for all. We still have so far to
go in our march to make Ameri-
ca America—but we must march
forward and never backwards.
Marian Wright Edelman is
president of the Children’s De-
fense Fund.
Security Means More than New and Bigger Guns
Risky war
business
r iChard k irsCh
From the Islam-
ic State to the streets
of Paris, Americans
get bombarded daily
with fresh reminders of conflicts
around the world. What’s harder
to figure out is what to do about
it. What would actually make us
safer?
Some politicians urge knee-
jerk reactions. Spend more on
the Pentagon, they say. But
one thing’s clear after years of
over-relying on military force: It
can actually make us less secure.
You don’t have to take my word
for it.
When journalist Bob Schief-
fer asked recently if he had re-
grets about invading Iraq, for-
by
mer President George
W. Bush lamented that
“a violent group of peo-
ple have risen — risen
up again.”
Bush can find one of
the culprits for this sad
development by looking
in the mirror. Without
that invasion and the sectarian
chaos it unleashed, there would
be no Islamic State (ISIS). What
will it take for the U.S. govern-
ment to grasp that short-term
military solutions create long-
term crises?
Sadly, our leaders remain
hooked on military “solutions,”
which too often make the world
more dangerous. In fact, Pres-
ident Barack Obama’s 2016
funding request for the Penta-
gon’s base budget is the biggest
in U.S. history.
Total military expenditures,
including nuclear weapons and
war spending, gobble up well
over half of the nation’s discre-
tionary budget — even as we
continue to draw down troops
from Afghanistan. Much of that
budget growth funds weapons
systems unsuited to today’s bat-
tlefields. Washington’s spending
billions to pad the pockets of
Pentagon industry insiders who
reap record profits while doing
little to enhance national secu-
rity.
The American people must
demand a new definition of
security — both at home and
abroad — that means more than
new and bigger guns.
In the Middle East, that means
diplomatically engaging coun-
tries directly threatened by the
Islamic State. It also means tak-
ing common sense steps — like
providing economic and human-
itarian assistance — to address
the “ISIS crisis” in a way that
creates friends, not enemies.
“What matters more to Ameri-
can security?” Sen. Chris Murphy
asked when funding for food as-
sistance for Syrian refugees was
running out. “One day of missiles
being fired at ISIS inside Syria?
Or being able to feed hundreds
of thousands of hungry refugees,
who, if they don’t get a square
meal…are going to turn to ISIS?”
Sadly, our leaders are better at
finding money for weapons than
for food. With budget priorities
like that, we’ve got problems
back home, too. Public invest-
ment in America’s future — on
roads, schools, and scientific
research — is at historic lows.
And the government has slashed
spending on a wide range of vi-
tal programs that provide securi-
ty and opportunity for American
families since 2010.
Last year, domestic discre-
tionary spending fell by some
$15 billion, while the Pentagon
used its massive slush fund —
the Overseas Contingency Oper-
ations account — to escape any
significant cuts at all.
As Congress ponders the
federal budget, it must focus
on what will really make our
families more secure. Reining
in wasteful Pentagon spending
is one great way to get started.
But cutting the security of Amer-
icans at home — including our
education, health care, retire-
ment, and child care — hits us
where we live.
Richard Kirsch is a senior
fellow at the Roosevelt Institute
and the author of Fighting for
Our Health: The Epic Battle to
Make Health Care a Right in the
United States.