Klan trace seen in Selma bridge's name

A national historical marker is seen with the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the background Tuesday in Selma, Ala.
A national historical marker is seen with the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the background Tuesday in Selma, Ala.

SELMA, Ala. -- When the nation's first black president steps onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge to honor the marchers beaten there 50 years ago, he'll be standing on a structure that's at once synonymous with the civil-rights struggle and a tribute to a reputed Ku Klux Klan leader.

The latter fact had all but faded from memory until recently, when a Selma student group launched an online petition to rename the landmark bridge.

During his address Saturday, President Barack Obama will stand near a new historic marker commemorating "Bloody Sunday," when white police beat demonstrators marching for black voting rights on March 7, 1965. The sign, created earlier this year by the Alabama Tourism Department, notes Obama's 2007 appearance there before his election and the accolades for Selma, the film about the march.

It offers no details about Pettus, a Confederate general and U.S. senator who lived in Selma after the Civil War. The Encyclopedia of Alabama, an online database sponsored by the University of Alabama, Auburn University and the Alabama Department of Education, says Pettus held the title of grand dragon of the Alabama Klan in 1877 -- an assertion that's questioned by some historians.

Just beyond the other end of the bridge, a recently erected billboard bears the image of another Confederate general, Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. The ad, sponsored by a group dedicated to honoring Forrest, invites visitors to see Selma's "War Between the States" historic sites; next month is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Selma, in which Forrest fought.

As the anniversary of the demonstrations approaches, a student group in Selma is petitioning to rename the bridge. The online petition, addressed to Selma Mayor George Patrick Evans and the National Parks Service, has been up for about two weeks. It does not propose a new name for the bridge.

John Gainey, executive director of Students Unite, a youth group that began the petition, said having a white supremacist's name attached to the city's most visible landmark illustrates the city's deep racial divisions a half-century after the marchers were beaten at the bridge.

Just as in the 1960s, Gainey said, Selma is split by race. He said blacks attend public schools, and most whites go to private academies. Many blacks still live in run-down shanties while whites occupy nice homes with manicured lawns. Yet the town of nearly 20,000 people is about 80 percent black.

"We think it really does represent something larger," Gainey said.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a civil-rights activist, said the bridge should not honor someone with purported Klan ties.

"They're responsible for too much death and misery. We don't need to honor them," said Lowery, who participated in a 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. "I'm with the kids. Let's change it."

Selma historian Alston Fitts doubts Pettus had anything to do with the KKK. Although the city was a hub of racial animus in the 1960s, Selma was known as a "safe place" for blacks after the Civil War in part because of a lack of Klan activity, he said.

"He was a pretty lousy Klan leader if that's what he was," Fitts said.

Pettus' views on race were widely known during Reconstruction. In July 1871, when Pettus testified before a congressional committee investigating the Klan, he made it clear that he believed whites, not blacks, were the victims in the South after the Civil War.

Pettus asserted that any campaign of intimidation was being waged by Republicans and "carpetbaggers" seeking to incite blacks to commit "acts of aggression on their part against the white people," according to congressional archives.

Michael Fitzgerald, a professor of history at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., is researching a book on Reconstruction-era Alabama. He said he hasn't found "persuasive evidence" that Pettus was a Klan officer or a member, but he said Pettus was "almost certainly" involved with the White League, which became a terrorist organization.

An attorney who entered the Confederate army as a major in 1861 and rose to the rank of brigadier general by 1863, Pettus was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1897 and served until his death in 1907 at age 86.

Pettus' legacy was still well-known in Selma when the bridge was constructed just east of downtown in 1940, so the span was named for a man revered locally as a tenacious Southern leader. With Jim Crow laws still in effect, blacks had virtually no say in the decision.

A Section on 03/04/2015

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