The iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River was named after an outspoken advocate for slavery and a Ku Klux Klan member. How can it maintain that association after the carnage of Bloody Sunday and the most famous walk for voting rights in American History on March 20-25, 1963?
Read below excerpts from an article in The Smithsonian, detailing the sordid record of the namesake of this bridge. Unfortunately the petition to rename the bridge is no longer open for signatures.
Who Was Edmund Pettus?
The march to freedom started on a bridge that honors a man bent on preserving slavery and segregation
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. . . What had once been up until the 1950s a bridge that connected the Southern present to the Southern past … gets rearranged after that march,” Giggie says. “The blood shed by those marchers very much reconsecrated the meaning of that bridge. It becomes less a symbol of the South’s past and a symbol of hope for its future.”
Today, a movement is afoot to rename the bridge. As of Saturday, a Change.org petition addressed to the National Park Service, the mayor of Selma and governor of Alabama was 40,000 signatures short of its 200,000-signatories goal.
. . . During the era of Reconstruction, when blacks—now free and the majority of the population in Alabama and throughout most of the Black Belt – were terrorized by the emergent Ku Klux Klan, Intimidation through violence was extensive. In the latter part of the 19th century, Alabama led the nation in lynchings, and Dallas County — where Selma is located — was no exception.
And whether Pettus participated in the violence directly or not is unknown, but he certainly would not have opposed it, Flynt said.
“I would be very surprised if a man of his social standing actually went out with guns and masks on, but the fact that he knew what was happening is almost inevitable,” Flynt said. “There’s really no way of excluding Edmund Pettus of responsibility from the violence. He helps organize it, he helps protect it, and he does not seek to prosecute anyone who did it.”
“Pettus became for Alabama’s white citizens in the decades after the Civil War, a living testament to the power of whites to sculpt a society modeled after slave society,” says Giggie.
Pettus served as chairman of the state delegation to the Democratic National Convention for more than two decades, and was Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan during the final year of Reconstruction.
“White planters had lost control of this society,” Flynt said. “The conservative Democratic Party was attempting to restore the old order, to disenfranchise blacks, to create a servile labor force. The conservative Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan were like a hand and glove.”
In 1896, at the age of 75, Pettus ran for U.S. Senate as a Democrat and won, beating incumbent James L. Pugh. His campaign relied on his successes in organizing and popularizing the Alabama Klan and his virulent opposition to the constitutional amendments following the Civil War that elevated former slaves to the status of free citizens.
Upon his election, Selma threw a reception for the newly minted senator. In reporting the occasion, one headline proclaimed that Pettus “Was Received with Booming Guns And The Shrill Whistles of all Our Industries” and the story went on to refer to the general as “Selma’s distinguished citizen.”
“That he was elected statewide demonstrates the power of a Confederate pedigree and the Ku Klux Klan political machine,” Flynt said. “You didn’t get the nomination unless you had the support of white elites in the Black Belt.”