Sunday, January 29, 2023

Week 69: Selma, Alabama


The Edmund Pettus Bridge is the famous bridge that black citizens from Selma tried to cross to march for voting rights, and the police stopped them and attacked them and knocked John Lewis unconscious. In the picture, I am pretty sure that the guy in the front with the blue suit and hat is John Lewis, and I am very sure that the woman in the yellow dress is Kamala Harris.

I have made it to a place in Alabama that even us West-Coasters have heard of, though maybe not for the best of reasons. Selma is not a very big city, with a population of 17,625, but it is famous for its civil rights history, and for a shameful day in American history.

The city is about 80% African-American, and it calls itself the "Queen City of the Black Belt," which Wikipedia says originally referred to the region's black soil, but took on an additional meaning referring to the ethnicity of the local population.

If I ever end up driving around Alabama, I would not mind going to Selma and taking a picture like the one posted here, even if Kamala Harris is not available to be in it.

Last week I wrote about tornadoes that had hit Sawyerville, Alabama in three different years. Selma had its own tornado earlier this month, as a large one tore up the downtown area, leaving it a "disaster area" and prompting the governor to declare a state of emergency.


This week I passed 5.5 million steps, so that's 11 half-million-step segments done, three to go. A little more than four months left.

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