An online petition to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma after civil rights leader and current Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) has garnered over 114,000 signatures.
Edmund Pettus represented Alabama in the United States Senate from 1897 until 1907. First a soldier for the United States in the Mexican-American War, he was later a leader in the Confederacy’s armed forces. He was also a self-proclaimed white supremacist, and many historians say, a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
Lewis is a storied leader of the 1960s civil rights movement. He was one of the organizers of the Selma to Montgomery marches, and on March 7, 1965, he was beaten and suffered a fractured skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge after a group of white Alabama State Troopers refused to let his peaceful protest cross.
Televised footage of the officers beating Lewis and his fellow demonstrators that day is often cited as a turning point in the civil rights movement.
“It hit me that far too often that we wait far too often until after people die to honor them,” Michael Starr Hopkins, the person who organized the petition, told the Montgomery Advertiser.
Lewis, 80, is currently undergoing treatment for stage IV pancreatic cancer.
Hopkins believes that Pettus “was a bitter racist, undeserving of the honor bestowed upon him.”
In recent weeks, George Floyd’s death while being detained by Minneapolis police officers, and the ensuing national unrest, have brought an intense focus on race relations and confederate monuments.
The Alabama State Senate approved a measure to rename the bridge in recent years, but the measure was not taken up by the House of Representatives.
Local leaders in Selma, along with U.S. Rep Terri Sewell (D-Birmingham), a Selma native, have expressed misgivings in the past with renaming the bridge that has such a prominent place in America’s civil rights history.
However, Sewell came out in support of changing the name on Monday in a statement sent to the Advertiser, saying that renaming Confederate sites and buildings is an “important step in the process towards racial healing.”
The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017 prevents renaming any historic structures over 40 years old. The cost of disobeying the Memorial Preservation Act is a one-time fine $25,000 dollars.
The city governments of Birmingham and Mobile have both agreed to pay that fine to remove Confederate monuments in recent days.
The petition to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge can be found here.
Henry Thornton is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can contact him by email: [email protected] or on Twitter @HenryThornton95
