Inside the fight to strip a KKK leader's name from Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge

[babylonsister]

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.

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This won't be easy

Gainey said that Students Unite would prefer not to see the bridge renamed after another individual. The organizers would instead want to "open it up to people in the Selma community" — who, the petition points out, are 80 percent African American. The ideal replacement, he said, would "show respect for the civil rights movement of 50 years ago and what still needs to happen in the community today."

But according to a report by Al.com, not everyone agrees - in fact, many Selma residents oppose the change. One white resident told the publication, "If we really want to make a change in our city, I'm not sure that changing the name of the bridge is going to help. I think it's going to be more divisive than unifying."

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http://www.vox.com/2015/3/7/8164801/selma-edmund-pettus-bridge-kkk