Kamala Harris travelled to historic Selma, Ala., to opine about the Mideast, while the town languishes in poverty
There’s a spot in Selma, Ala., where politicians go when they want to deliver what they hope will be an attention-grabbing statement.
It’s at the bottom of the town’s shabby main street, in a little parkette off to one side. The speaker stands with his or her back to the river, ensuring photographs catch the rusty framework of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the background.
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On March 3, it was U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris who stood at the foot of the bridge, its two steel arches curving away across the Alabama River behind her. Her message was about Israel, but it’s the date that was key, March 7 being the 59th anniversary of a savage day that changed the United States forever.
A bit of history might be required here, but don’t go away. Selma was a crucial site in the long, bloody fight for civil rights among Black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge was the scene of some of the most critical moments in that struggle.
It was there in March 1965 that 600 marchers set off on a trek to the state capital to protest the segregationist policies still in place a century after the Civil War. The moment they crossed the bridge, they were met by a wall of police, who waded into the peaceful crowd with clubs, whips and truncheons, some wrapped in barbed wire, cracking skulls and breaking bones in full expectation they could get away with an open display of racist brutality, just as they had so often in the past.
This time, however, the clash was caught by news cameras and played across the........