This far and no further

Editorial Note: This post was adapted from the preface of This Far and No Further.

Fifty years after my father took me to see the Newark riots, and 52 years after the historic marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, I found myself in Selma on break from an assignment in nearby Lowndes County. In 2017, Selma seemed unchanged from the city that Walker Evans photographed for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s.

My walk over the arch of the Edmund Pettus Bridge was transformative. Reaching the apex, I imagined the sea of blue-helmeted Alabama State Police, many on horseback, flanking Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark and hundreds of hate-fueled “vigilante” white citizens awaiting the signal to attack their prey.

I stood at the point where twenty-five-year-olds like John Lewis and Hosea Williams led some six hundred peaceful marchers toward this blue wall of local police, state troopers, and posse members. On the shoulder of the road, at the spot where Lewis and his comrades were beaten with clubs, I thought about my children, then near Lewis’s age, and about President Barack Obama’s ceremonial walk over that same arch just two years before my visit, when he and surviving participants of the civil rights movement commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches.

_{Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama, 2017}

_{This bridge is named for Edmund Pettus, a Confederate general, grand dragon of the KKK, and U.S. senator. It was the site of three attempts to march from Selma to Montgomery. The first ended when marchers halted and knelt to pray at the sight of mobs, police officers and state troopers prepared to stop them. The second took place on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, when mounted police attacked, beat and gassed demonstrators. The marchers finally crossed the bridge with federal court support on March 21, arriving at the State Capitol on March 25.}

I returned to Alabama a month later to begin tracing the events leading up to the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches of 1965. Again and again, I returned to the South with my camera to explore connections between history, justice and the vote. To Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the right to vote was supreme, eclipsing and containing within it all other rights. The late U.S. Rep. John Lewis lamented the number of people who “suffered, struggled and died to make it possible for every American to exercise the right to vote.”

It is almost miraculous that the indignity of disenfranchisement, along with the suffering and death that they faced, rarely provoked civil rights activists and sympathizers to reciprocate with violence of their own. As years of struggle passed, however, voices naturally emerged within the movement that reflected James Baldwin’s prescient warning: “No state has been able to foresee or prevent the day when their most ruined and abject accomplice — or most expensively dressed prostitute — will growl, ‘this far and no further.’”

Among nations, America has been uniquely active in preventing people of color and the poor from voting. Voter-suppression efforts didn’t end with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck “preclearance,” which required federal approval on any changes in voting and election laws in regions with significant histories of racially motivated disenfranchisement: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, as well as several counties or townships in six other states.

With the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, efforts to limit access to the vote accelerated. Today, restrictions to ballot access are enforced less by threat of physical violence than by subtler methods no less sinister: surgically administered, legislatively approved and judicially unchallenged gerrymandering; the widespread closure of polling stations; enhanced voter identification requirements; early voting cutbacks; and registration restrictions. Collectively, these measures minimize access to the ballot for students, working people and people of color. Is this the democracy we claim to represent at home and abroad?

_{View from the Speaker’s Podium, Mason Temple, Memphis, Tennessee, 2018}

_{On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Mason Temple in Memphis in support of the city’s striking sanitation workers. It was his final speech; he was assassinated the following day.}

The stirring experience I had on the Pettus Bridge was repeated as I moved through the Southeast. When I stood in places where hate and violence reigned for centuries — where enslaved people were bought and sold by white people of supposed higher intelligence, moral standing and relation to God — I came to understand that America has blood and shame soaked into its soil. Stunning landscapes and rich lore contribute to the mystique of the South, but this coexists with a history of extraordinary violence.

_{Selma, Alabama, 2017}

_{Some 3,000 people died during the Battle of Selma on April 2, 1865 (359 Union and 2,700 Confederate). One hundred years after that battle, Selma again became the site of an epic event: the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches of 1965. To an outsider viewing Selma today, William Faulkner’s famous line, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past,” perfectly characterizes the city’s atmosphere.}

Many died to procure the right to vote. Many more were beaten. And many untold more were scarred by the psychological toll of life under American apartheid. Though excited and inspired on that first walk in Selma, I was angered and haunted as my journey progressed. I’m ashamed to say that I had never properly acknowledged the obvious. I was shielded from this history — much of which occurred within my lifetime — by white privilege. Eventually, my anger gave way to something more powerful: resolve. It wasn’t enough for me to recognize I was part of the problem. With my modest means, I wanted to offer a solution — a solution to the problem of historical amnesia.

Early in this project, a young Black American man who grew up in Sumner, Mississippi — the town in which Emmett Till’s killers were acquitted in 1955 — asked how I got started on this journey. I naively said that voter suppression simply seemed very un-American to me, considering all that our countrymen had given to secure voting rights.

Without a moment’s delay, he replied, “Maybe it’s very American.”

_{Copy of Literacy Test, Selma, Alabama, 2017}

_{Literacy tests such as this one were key mechanisms in the legal disenfranchisement of Black Americans from the end of Reconstruction to the 1960s. These almost impossible-to-pass exams often excluded poor whites and immigrants from the ballot box as well.}