Selma, a place where I shared my heart with the black

Screenshot from Selma

A couple of days ago, I found a pile of sticker-pads in the pocket of my old winter coat with the whole content of the famous speech - I Have a Dream - written on them, laminated with adhesive tapes carefully and time-stamped on each one, marking my past senior high school year, the ending of 2011.

I read them out aloud again, feeling the rhyme of each word and line, re-tasting each word of power, trying to evoke the old, rusted, yet sweet memories of my juvenile age. But, no matter how powerfully, how fervently, how well I read each word out aloud. I wouldn't be possible to share the history embodied in the words with the writer and speaker, Martin Luther King Jr. There was the heaven and hell in the real sense which shared by him and the people at that time, shared by this one of the greatest non-violent activities in the world and all the black people who fought for their rights with their lives and those white brothers and sisters who chose to take a stand eventually and outcry the voice of justice for the black.

I thought a sigh would be the end of my story. But fortunately, I was wrong. The happenstance reminds me that delectable surprise in life is real and the very ending of a chapter could just happen to be a new beginning of another story. I bumped into the movie - Selma with a recommendation of it from a friend and mentor of mine. This movie brought me back to the honorific and brutal time  when black people could be beaten up by the white with legitimate reasons, when they had no tables and seats in the white restaurants, where they must act like second-rate citizens in their own homeland and had no basic voting rights that were supposedly entitled to every soul in the American soil by the Constitution.

Under Martin Luther King, black people in Selma, Alabama where the deepest root of segregation was planted in the South back then, hosted a non-violent march. They were walking along the route with their baggage, their hearts and their souls without knowing what was waiting for them ahead. When they got to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, troopers and rangers in uniform, smoke cans, whiplashes, batons and clubs were in order, waiting for their preys to show up. Those non-violent were reluctant to disperse, ergo, the smoke cans dispersed, batons dispersed, clubs dispersed. They were dispersed everywhere, on the black women's faces, on the backbone of every present soul, on the shivering and staggering legs of old men. It was remotely the equal conversation or standoff between people to people and soul to soul, it was the vicious slaughter and crime perpetrated by brutal hunters who were hunting down the very same kind of themselves - with no mercy.

A screenshot from Selma. Avenue: the Edmund Pettus Bridge

When it comes to humanity, every sad story deserves a good ending. After the live broadcasting of this march by a journalist, millions of white people stood up and decided no longer to sit tight on their hands. They don't have the heart to let their brothers and sisters suffer the endless crimes. They wiped tears on the face, starting a long trek to Selma to show their support from every corner of the United States. As the evidence of their presence, black people knew that they were no long alone in this war, which flagrantly violated the civil rights of the black. As a result of the wakened consciousness and awareness that were ignited by the fresh and blood, enormous white people joined the second march. According to the statistics, in the end, 1/3 of the marchers were white.

No one should ever forget the history, especially the diverse and illuminating voices in it. At the end of the movie, blacks have long-desired grins on their faces. They changed the legislation, making it a concrete right that every black can vote, making voting a absolutely right that every one can perform in the American soil as an decent American. But mostly important, they changed their day-to-day life. They got the tables, they got the seats, they got the faith of living a bright life.

Everyone is equal. May we can talk as a soul to a soul, a life to a life.