Selma, Montgomery, The Bridge, The Reckoning

A Decade-Spanning Travel Piece by Dwight Cathcart

Dear Republic,

An important subplot of The Republic of Letters is to build up the profile of Dwight Cathcart. Dwight is 85 years old, which is a tremendous amount of old. He has written four novels, of which he writes, “they have not attracted as many readers as they deserve.” As he has demonstrated in his previous piece for The Republic of Letters, Dwight writes beautifully, and we are honored to have him reflect on the enormity of changes in the conception of civil rights across the span of his life.

-ROL

SELMA, MONTGOMERY, THE BRIDGE, THE RECKONING

We arrived at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Tuesday afternoon, May 27, 2025. “We” were my husband, my daughter and my son and me, and we had come in a rented car. We had come from various places in the Northeast, and we had driven from Atlanta to Montgomery and then on US 80 to Selma. As we neared Selma, we got glimpses of the bridge through trees as we drove toward it, but it was not until we were close that we got a view of the whole thing. It is painted white and has one giant arch over the Alabama River, from river bank to river bank, extending the roadway on both ends so that at the ends the supporting steel is under the roadway and then above the roadway in the middle of the bridge. This creates a lattice of steel above the roadway on which the name of the bridge—EDMUND PETTUS BRIDGE—is prominent on both ends. The town of Selma is on the other end of the bridge. The bridge rises a little in the middle and prevents a person from seeing the town at street level. As a visitor crosses over the bridge toward town, US 80 becomes Broad Street.

The view of the bridge, looking into the town, is a familiar one. I suppose everyone has seen scores of pictures of this end of this bridge, the roadway, the lattice of steel painted white, the glimpse of the town beyond the bridge, the archway over the road, the steel arch over the road with the legend EDMUND PETTUS BRIDGE. Pettus was a Confederate Major General and a local hero who served in the US Senate after the Civil War. Today his name is inextricably linked to the civil rights marches along US 80 from Selma to Montgomery, both of which were major slave-trading towns, and to Bloody Sunday. In 1961, four years before the march, out of 15,000 voting age African Americans in Selma, only 156 were registered to vote. Usually in pictures the view of the bridge is also a view of a lot of people leaving town on foot, coming toward you—that is, toward US 80 and toward the stretch of highway that leads to the state capital, Montgomery. They are mostly pictures of the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 or re-enactments of that march. This was the view in 1965 in a picture in a newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee, when I was in graduate school, the right side of the road filled with people while the left was empty except for the highway patrolmen, and, over all, the lattice of steel with the legend of the name. The same view—the arch, the name, the crowds—is in pictures when they were printed later in newspapers and books about the period. They only change when the leaders—prominent people who come to the bridge—change. In my lifetime, they have included Joe Biden, Robert Kennedy, John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, George Bush, Kamala Harris, Drew Barrymore, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando.

These pictures show a column of Black Americans on the right sidewalk—the marchers —coming toward the viewer, the first led by Hosea Williams and by John Lewis, a man I learned about first on Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965. In his later life, he was a Congressman from Georgia 5th Congressional District until his death on July 17, 2020. The articles about this first march also gave the details about the highway patrolmen attacking the marchers with billyclubs. The march was an attempt to publicize the right of the people to be able to register to vote and, more profoundly, to publicize the fact that the people had the right to vote.

The United States Constitution

15th Amendment

The right of the citizens of the United States

to vote shall not be denied or abridged

by the United States or by any state

on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The marchers were up to the task. African Americans demanded White Americans focus on the Black Americans’ inability to vote, prevented from voting by a racist local government. It was thrilling just to be standing there. I hadn’t been to Selma before, and I didn’t know any of the people involved in the pictures, but, in 1965 and when I was 30, these people were saying, Now! They were saying, I want the vote now! They had a right. I knew that. And it was clear to me today and to the people with me—my husband, my daughter, and my son—that there had been no reason to deny them the vote. They had been born here. They had it by right. The Constitution demanded it. Whatever the politicians had said about public safety, when the troopers left so many marchers bloodied, had been shown to be meretricious.

After the march, I moved more firmly into the progressive column. My parents remained where they were, mouthing states rights, and they’ve gone too far and they’re asking for too much, looking beleaguered and defeated. When the march was going on I was in a literature class in a room on a university campus, knowing what was happening in Selma, though I didn’t even know where Selma was, and feeling that maybe I should be there too—there were other people from my university that had gone down, even though I had sometimes been aware of the glimmer of a realization that I was gay and that my civil rights were being endangered also. But I concluded, I need to go to class and work on my assignments and finish my degree. Many American white students sought safety then in their classrooms when what was happening was happening on the streets. Today, in 2025, I know that I made the wrong choice in 1965. I’ve known that for a long time. There was just no getting around that. I had also made the wrong choice during Freedom Summer 1964, when I had done the same thing. I made choices based on the importance of my academic career, but twenty years later, I quit the whole academic enterprise and started writing gay novels, which I have done for the last 41 years. But it was wrong to focus on academia because treating African Americans the way we did at that time was just more important, a more profound issue. It was more important that any other thing I could have been doing.

The next day, May 28, 2025, we took US 80 to Montgomery. The highway climbed a slight hill and then dipped, and we contemplated the effects on the marchers in 1965. It would have been hot and tiring. It takes about an hour to drive from Selma to Montgomery. The marchers stopped for the night four times before getting to Montgomery. In Montgomery we found the Legacy Museum, a large modern building built on what The New York Times says is a site where enslaved people were warehoused. The museum contains exhibits telling a story beginning with the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean or North America, giving information about the transatlantic slave trade and then the American slave trade and the lives of enslaved persons. There are sculpture, data, graphs, artifacts and photographs. It is absorbing. It is painful to see. The New York Times says of it, “There is nothing like it in the country.”

After two hours in the Legacy Museum, we drove to the Memorial for Peace and Justice. This memorial remembers and honors those men and women who were victims of racial terror lynchings in the South during the most active period, between 1877 and 1950. The building is on the crest of a hill above the Alabama State Capitol, smooth green grass covering the top, and is very large and flat-roofed and open to the elements. It is built around an open courtyard, called the Freedom Square. Visitors walk up to it on a pathway that takes them past a memorial sculpture, six full-size bronze mostly naked figures—men and women—connected by a rusted chain from collar to collar. In addition, there is one infant in the arms of an adult woman. It is very painful to see. It is by Ghanian Kwame Akoto Bamfo and is called Nkyinkyim or Twisted.

When visitors enters the Memorial itself, they are confronted with pipes hanging vertically from the ceiling attached to rusted steel boxes, six feet from top to bottom, each with the name of a county and state where there was a lynching and the name of the person lynched and a year, all incised into the steel. These boxes are hung low and are only an inch or two off the floor of the memorial. They are so tall, however, that only a very tall person can see over the top of one. These boxes are hung in ordered rows from side to side and from front to back, and because each row of boxes is staggered from the preceding row they almost block the way forward.

At the end of the first side of the building, visitors turn right and soon notice that the boxes are hung at a slightly different height. Then they notice that the boxes are rising to perhaps one or two feet above the visitor’s head. When the visitors get to the next turning, they can see the boxes are rising even more, five feet, six feet above the visitor’s head. In whole areas of the Memorial, the boxes are six feet above the visitor’s head. They are so high, the visitor cannot read the names and dates on the sides of the boxes, and the Memorial presents this information on the nearby wall, or sometimes on the bottom of a box, so the visitor can read the text only by standing under the box and looking up. The metaphor is clear by now. These boxes suggest the images all of us have seen, black and white photographs of lynchings with the victims hanging by the neck from a rope around the high limb of a tree. There is a whole forest of them in this Legacy Memorial for Peace and Justice. Actually, there are 805 boxes, and the organizers of the Memorial say that more of the lynching victims are being discovered. A number of the boxes have as many as 15 names and dates on them, and several have as many as 30.

I was 11 years old when the last lynching marked by this Memorial took place, and I have photographs now of my children, walking ahead of me, looking at the boxes and reading their names, or looking up at the boxes and reading about death and when. There are 805 boxes, each six feet long, made of corten steel that have rusted to a deep, rich, red. There are over 4,400 names, consequently over 4,400 stories—tragedies—to absorb. The Memorial opened on April 26, 2018, when I was 78, and I have wanted to see it ever since. I needed to pay my respects to the dead, and I was also interested in the question of How does a culture memorialize such a massive tragedy, when the effects are still going on? I knew about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, but the United States has never tried to answer such a question. The problem, it seemed to me, was that the more the designers tried to personalize those memorialized, the less effective the memorial would be. But one could not say, It doesn’t matter if the individual person lynched in, say, the county I was born in, Richland County, South Carolina, was depersonalized and made a statistic, because, of course, it does matter. It was a real human being who was lynched. It matters that the last person lynched in the state of South Carolina was lynched in 1947 in Greenville County. Willie Earle, 24 years old, was mistakenly thought to be the murderer of a white cab driver, and he ended up in jail. Thirty-one men hauled him out of jail and took him out in the countryside and beat him and then shot him. A Black man who knew him went the next day to the place where they had taken him, and said later for PBS that he could see Earle’s brains on the ground, in the undergrowth, and said, “It was sad.” Thirty one men were charged with Earle’s death, and when they held the trial, the jury deliberated five hours and acquitted them all of all charges. That happened on February 17, 1947, when I was eight years old, just three years before the end of the Equal Justice Initiative’s data on lynchings in the South.

On February 18, 1965, after the period covered by the EJI, Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered in Selma. He was a young civil rights worker, helping to register people to vote, and on February 18, 1965, he was at a church for a meeting about voting rights. The Alabama Highway Patrol broke in, ordered people to leave the building, and started beating people. Jackson tried to defend two of his family members and was shot by the Highway Patrol. He died eight days later. At his funeral, Martin Luther King, Jr., said these words:

I never will forget as I stood by his bedside a few days ago...how radiantly he still responded, how he mentioned the freedom movement and how he talked about the faith that he still had in his God. Like every self-respecting Negro, Jimmie Jackson wanted to be free...We must be concerned not merely about who murdered him but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer.

Back at the main exit of the memorial, the visitor passes a huge block of concrete about chest high and maybe four feet thick and twenty-five feet long. Out of the concrete rises a line of men, most of them showing only their heads or only the tops of their skulls but one showing a man’s chest, and all of them holding up their arms. It is a reference to the moment when a law enforcement officer says, “Hands up!” The men are trapped in concrete to their shoulders and can’t escape. The title of the piece is Raise up! It is by an American, Hank Willis Thomas, who also created the giant sculpture called The Embrace on Boston Common, in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King, which shows the Kings in the midst of an embrace, in which all their body parts have been hidden except their arms, embracing. It is 22 feet high and 40 feet wide. It is magnificent, wrapping, as it does, all of Boston in its embrace.

My children and my husband and I went away from the Memorial aware that the effects of racial terror lynchings are still going on. And because they are still going on, it is necessary to come here to Montgomery and to Selma to remind ourselves how long it has been going on and that it is still going on today. There is a likelihood that it will happen again, if we again sink back into the time before the Equal Justice Initiative and forget that once we thought we believed in the equal humanity of humans. But, of course, the Memorial raises the question, Did we ever really believe in the equal humanity of persons? More privately, I feel that what happened at the Edmund Pettus Bridge is that the marchers showed that they knew they had civil rights, and they were determined that the state of Alabama should know it too. This raised a personal thought with me. I understood that it takes a while for a people to learn to think about these things this way. At the time, because of hundreds of marches, and sit-ins, and pickets, I had come to see that what was at issue was civil rights and their denial to African Americans. And the moment when African Americans had acknowledged their own civil rights and demanded that they be acknowledged also by the city of Selma and the State of Alabama, then, turning to me, I had to acknowledge that, as a gay man, for much of my life I had acted as if I had no civil rights. I acted as if gay people had no civil rights until the Stonewall Rebellion June 28, 1969. And when Stonewall happened, then the only thing to happen next was rebellion. After Stonewall I started to think of myself as an oppressed minority, and I started to fight back as a gay man with rights. When that happened, I was a much happier man than I had been before. This is the way we learn.

On the way back, we had breakfast in Montgomery, then drove to Atlanta and then had a short time together in Atlanta before my husband and I went to our plane and the younger people went to theirs. But even though there wasn’t much time, there was enough, and we strung the bits and pieces together like pearls on a string, talking about Selma and Montgomery and ourselves.

Dwight Cathcart’s husband is Courtney, his daughter is Mary Moore, his son is Fran. His queer novels—Ceremonies, Winter Rain, Adam in the Morning, Race Point Light—are about a queer man living in America 1945-2010. He is a writer.