When you go to Selma, Alabama, be prepared. Selma is a very poor place, full of derelict storefronts and a long strip outside of town full of junkyards, check cashing places and used furniture stores. There is a nicely maintained synagogue, but we were told that the Jews had all left. Apparently there's an endowment. There are lots of churches, many of which are of the unaffiliated ecstatic persuasion. There's a feed store and mill that also sells pecans for $1.00 a pound unshelled and $1.30 a pound if they run the nuts through the sheller. We bought five pounds.
There's a lovely jewel of a hotel in the midst of this desolation. Apparently city fathers acquired and renovated the St. James Hotel, at the Selma end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and near the National Voting Rights Museum. The museum has a labor-of-love quality that is kind of endearing. There is a small gift shop, and there are some great photos documenting the three attempts to march from Selma to Montgomery. Only after the death of Rev. Reeb, a Boston Unitarian minister, was enough national attention focused on the efforts of the civil rights marchers to allow the march to happen.
All this is rather depressing but inspiring at the same time. Change is possible, despite the odds.
