The late, great Milton Mayer wrote this reflection on Selma in our May 1965 magazine:
“Everybody knows that the integration battle is won. It will take another half century or so to mop up, and another two or three centuries to eliminate the bigotry that had its last-ditch stand in the opposition, North no less than South, to interracial marriage.”
Mayer was no Pollyanna. He tied the civil-rights struggle in the United States to the global struggle for justice, in words that resonate today: “we are the minority rich, we Americans,” he wrote, "and we cannot think of a better way of stopping Communism than to kill the uppity poor. And so it was in my day in Selma long ago. We were the white minority, and we could not think of a better way of stopping integration than to keep the uppity Negroes walled up."
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