Civil rights icon moved to tears by Alabama police chief’s apology
rawstory.comRep. John Lewis (R-GA) was moved to tears on Saturday by an apology from a police chief in Montgomery, Alabama, who said his department utterly failed to protect civil rights marchers as they disembarked from a Grayhound bus into a segregated terminal in 1961.
Lewis was one of 21 protesters who stepped off that bus and into an angry melee asmore than 300 white southerners attacked the groupwith baseball bats and other blunt objects. Despite an order by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to protect these so-called “Freedom Riders,” police backed off in Montgomery and let the mob have its way.
Appearing with Lewis on Saturday aftera symbolic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Alabama— where 600 civil rights marchers were brutally attacked by police in 1965 — Montgomery Chief of Police Kevin Murphy formally apologized for the bus terminal incident and presented Lewis with his badge.
“It means a great deal,” Lewis said, according to MSNBC. “I teared up. I tried to keep from crying.”
“I think what I did today should have been done a longtime ago,” Murphy said. “It needed to be done. It needed to be spoken because we have to live with the truth and it is the truth.”
Inspiring story without question…it’s worth pointing out though that Rep. Lewis is NOT a Republican though.
“...I realized I was being forced to consider how far I would go for another group of people’s rights. I’d never been confronted with something as life-or-death as 1964 Mississippi; nothing so urgent or morally clear. Those fights seem global now, belonging to the Arab Spring or Malala Yousafzai. ...But maybe the scale of a movement and its moral purity was beside the point. I thought back to the words of Tracey Brown in New Orleans, who implored white transplants to “align themselves with these grassroots organizations”—and New Orleans residents—“that already exist, rather than creating new ones.” Moments in everyday life, not just historic movements, provide opportunities to be an ally. It’s up to us to recognize them.”
—Nona Willis Aronowitz
Mt. Zion United Methodist Church. (Aaron Cassara) via The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172729/andrew-goodman-michael-schwerner-and-power-being-ally#
