Inside the fight to strip a KKK leader's name from Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge
Updated by Jenée Desmond-Harris on March 7, 2015, 8:00 a.m. ET
This weekend, as President Obama and members of Congress travel to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a new generation of activists is working to strip the name of Edmund Pettus — a former state legislator who doubled as a top KKK official — from the city's most famous civil rights landmark.
Students Unite, an organization made mostly of college and graduate students focused on social justice issues in Selma, has collected more than 158,000 signatures on a Change.org petition calling on Alabama leaders to rename the bridge, where police viciously beat demonstrators marching for voting rights on March 7, 1965.
But because the bridge is both part of a federal highway and a National Historic landmark —not to mention a source of sentimentality for some in Alabama — erasing the avowed racist's name from it won't be as simple as some think.
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/7/8164801/selma-edmund-pettus-bridge-kkk
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Even though Edmund Pettus was a vile racist and member of the KKK, I would not want the name of the bridge changed. For decades that name brings back memories of the Civil Rights movement and how difficult times were down there. To rename the bridge would wipe away some of the history and lessons we've learned over the years.
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