In Orwellian juxtaposition, this weekend marked the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when racial justice marchers "rewrote the story of the civil rights movement in their blood" even as the current regime moves ever further to erase that story and many others by deleting thousands of images of unholy diversity - women, minorities, yes the Enola Gay - and banning pernicious words like "at risk," "bias," "equity," "female," "marginalize," "systemic," the history of who we've been and tried to become. Beyond evil.

Thus is an alternate reality constructed under the rubric of a new Bigots 'R Us ruling party. "Climate" is scrubbed from government websites, we're shaking down Canada in a fantastical trade and drug war over imaginary fentanyl labs, we're awash in a "national energy emergency" as we drill for more oil and gas under less review than ever before, food stamps, cancer research, safety nets and humanitarian aid are "bad" but more billions for billionaires is "good, "free speech" means locking up opponents of genocide, Rep. Al Green should be ejected from civil discourse for shaking "his pimp cane" at the fuehrer, and people/airplanes on the East coast are scrambling to avoid falling space debris from "rapid, unscheduled disassembly" of things badly assembled by the unelected Nazi who's already inflicting many of these other ills.

Meanwhile the Dept. of Defense, run by drunken Christo-fascist and sexual predator Pete Hegseth, is safeguarding our national security by declaring "DEI is dead" and moving to obliterate any toxic remnants of racial or gender equity as a social good. The Gulf-of-Mexico-partial A.P. says the Pentagon has flagged and vowed to delete from websites over 26,000 photos for dubious diversity-adjacent connections. Some choices were clear-cut. Gone are all notable military females or people of color: Col. Jeannie Leavitt, America's first female fighter pilot, the first three women to graduate from the Marine Corps’ infantry training, World War II Medal of Honor winner Pfc. Harold Gonsalves (suspiciously brown), ditto Army Sgt. Maj. Ernesto Lopez Jr. graduating from Lackland Air Force Base and three of his relatives serving in the National Guard (ditto).

Other choices seemed just-right-no-brainers, but proved otherwise. Their move to obliterate the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the nation's first Black military pilots who served in a segregated WW ll unit, met with outrage, after which the Air Force quickly reversed itself; the White House charged the perps with "malicious compliance." Because these cretins are as stupid as they are venal, their most Leslie-Nelson-movie-dumb move was removing six photos of the historic B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Japan in 1945. Its pilot, Col. Paul Tibbetts Jr., had fondly named the plane after his mother Enola Gay Tibbetts, which okay is pretty weird in itself, but still never imagining the stupid of the future. On social media, many so-gay memes giddily popped up, along with several photos of a newly christened Enola Straight.

More stupid followed. Several soldiers named Gay - Sgt. Major A.C. Gay, Ensign George H. Gay (Battle of Midway) were summarily erased, and Brig. Gen. Jason Woodworth, nice and white but posing at Camp Pendleton with Philip Nguyen and Thu Ha Anders at a Vietnamese display during Diversity Celebration Day. Also photos of an Army Corps dredging project in California after they noted biologists were recording fish data - breed, weight...gender. More random idiocy, either perpetrated by AI or ketamine-fueled DOGE bros, led to the perplexing disappearance of "Deadlift contenders raise the bar pound by pound” and "Minnesota brothers reunite in Kuwait." Commemorative months - black, women's, Hispanic history - are already gone. With up to 100,000 items eventually targeted, many wonder how long the Dept of Transportation will survive.

Though King Donnie mostly looks at pictures, a word purge soon started, with over 400 terms disappeared by the guy who on Day One issued the executive order, "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Now banished by regime decree - encompassing government memos, guidelines, public-facing sites and possibly contracts - is language that tracks our political, social, moral history, often exposing a racist bent that views "diversity" as inherently at odds with "merit."and fairness a non-starter. Banned are accessible, activism, advocate, sense of belonging, cultural heritage, climate crisis, ethnicity, excluded, female, gender, health disparity, historically, multicultural, tribal, political, race, sex, social justice, women.
Purged from NIH records: obesity, fluoride, bird flu, opioids, stem cell, vaccine, abortion, peanut allergies (a Marxist hoax).

To revise the future, one must revise the past - when, you know, America was great. This moment of chaos depends on it, which is why record crowds visited Selma, Alabama on Sunday to mark the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when hundreds of civil rights leaders and non-violent activists both black and white attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand voting rights for African Americans. They came to remember it, to honor it, to pay tribute to the fortitude of John Lewis and all the foot soldiers who came under and endured daily attacks - "We went where we were called" - and to reiterate that for far too many their long fight for voting rights, for equal justice, for the essential freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution remains, now more than ever, "an unfinished endeavor."

In that era of Jim Crow laws and KKK lynchings, almost a year after passage of the Civil Rights Act, Selma, Dallas County, Alabama and much of the American south was still a white supremacist police state. Not long before, white nationalist terrorists had bombed Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls; it took many decades before any were brought to justice. Despite growing protests on behalf of voting and other rights, thanks to still-prevalent poll taxes, literacy tests, widespread intimidation and racist state leaders like Alabama's die-hard segregationist Gov. George Wallace, less than 1% of Black people, even if middle-class, were eligible to vote in many areas. "This was a vicious, violent system," recalled one activist. "You could die trying to register to vote and wasn’t nobody going to do anything about it."

The Selma march was sparked by both that fight and the murder in nearby Marion of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old veteran, organizer, father and church deacon as he tried to protect his mother and 82-year-old grandfather from being beaten by cops at an earlier voting rights protest. In response, Alabama state trooper James Fowler shot Jackson twice in the stomach; he died 8 days later. No charges were filed against Fowler until 2007, when he pled guilty to 2nd-degree manslaughter and served less than six months. Galvanized by Jackson's murder, John Lewis, then the young head of SNCC, decided to lead about 500 peaceful protesters, black and white, from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery to denounce Jackson's death and insist on the rights he'd died for. First, though, they had to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Mid-way, they were met with a phalanx of billy-club-armed state troopers, who issued their famous two-minute warning for the marchers to turn back. Within less than a minute, they began viciously beating the men, women and children , eventually turning tear gas, cattle prods and whips on them. At least 58 people were injured; many were hospitalized. Lewis, who later served decades in the House as "the conscience of Congress," famously had his skull fractured by a trooper's baton as he lay on the ground. For years, he declared that "Selma, the bridge, was a test of the belief that love was stronger than hate. And it was." Lewis' assault, and all the rest, was captured by James 'Spider' Martin, a 25-year-old photographer for the Birmingham News, who documented both Jackson's shooting and its subsequent violence using his camera as "a weapon of discovery."

His images of the savage reality of voter suppression hit the front pages of newspapers across the country; ABC even interrupted coverage about the Nazis' Nuremberg trials to show them. A grateful MLK Jr. told Martin, "The whole world saw your pictures," which galvanized nationwide civil rights protests, prompted LBJ to send 2,000 National Guardsmen to escort a subsequent, larger, non-violent march to Montgomery later that month, and arguably helped nudge him to sign the Voting Rights Act that August. Today, with a resurgent right wing relentlessly working to again disenfranchise black voters - redrawn district lines, voter IDs, fewer ballot drop boxes - while persistently, essentially seeking to erase that bloody past, Martin's images of what the Selma marchers achieved and are now fighting to hold onto help keep that history alive.

On Sunday, as large crowds went to Selma to march in carefully choreographed time slots, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts launched a national exhibit of 70 of Martin's newly-restored images titled,“Selma is Now," In this dark moment, the mood of the event was a complex mix of anger, determination, fear that today's "stress test of American resolve (isn’t) being met with sufficient opposition" as in the past, when "people stood together (to) march in hope." Some spoke of "a long trench warfare," of "not seeing themselves as protagonists of this story,” feeling "stuck between fear and anxiety looking at the world on fire," wondering how many will "be willing to bleed," like John Lewis. Most vitally, they insisted on recognizing that history happened here, and will not be erased: "It's a story that needs to be told and retold...that we simply cannot let pass."

Alabama state troopers form roadblock on far side of Edmund Pettus Bridge. Spider Martin/Briscoe Center for American History