Word: smitherman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blacks and a few whites outside the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sunday, March 7. They would march despite an order from Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had earlier declared that mass demonstrations "led by career and professional agitators" would not be permitted. Selma Mayor Joe T. Smitherman also opposed the march. The crowd at the church included Jesse Jackson...
...result of the 1965 march, said conditions in Selma are much better now. A job then, he recalled, meant "50 cents a day and ten hours a day. You can get a lot more money now." Selma was once almost totally dependent on agriculture, mostly cotton. Now, observed Smitherman, still the mayor 20 years later, "there are 65 different sorts of manufacturing operations here." But Dallas County suffers a 15% unemployment rate; knowledgeable sources estimate the adult black unemployment rate at about 30%. The marchers formed two lines and moved toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Sixty state troopers were massed...
...father told me it would be history in the making," Ross recalled last week, "and it was. That was a different time then. I'm glad to see blacks got all their rights. It's something to be proud of." Smitherman agreed, "We look back on it now, and we were wrong. Every American ought to have the right to vote...