Dear Editor, 

Earlier this month, the nation and the world stopped to remember the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march and the Voting Rights Act that was born as a result.

This is rightfully so as the Voting Rights Act cemented, once and for all, rights that had been for too long denied to the majority of Selmians and to a large portion of Americans.

But this year also marks the 25th anniversary of another monumental event in Selma’s history — the 1990 school riots. In 1990, I was a seventh grader at what was then called Westside Middle School.

I still remember the “protestors” bursting through the front door of Westside and running through the halls, and the fear that gripped the school on that day. When Westside and Selma High School reopened a week later, they did so under the protection of hundreds of armed Alabama state troopers and National Guardsmen.

For the few white students who dared show back up for school that next week (I was one of them), we gained an appreciation for how the “Little Rock 9” must have felt decades earlier — for we now understood what it was like to have to depend on a military escort to ensure that we could safely attend public school.

There have been many articles written about Selma in the national press in the lead up to 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

To me, the most frustrating of these articles are those that compare Selma’s current state of segregation to its pre-1965 segregation and declare that nothing has changed.

While that might look the case on the surface, those of us who came of age in Selma from approximately 1970 to 1990 know differently. We know there was a time when blacks and whites attended the same schools, played on the same sports teams, and grew up together.

The children who grow up in Selma now must find it difficult to believe that such a place ever existed. But just as something great was born in Selma in 1965, something great died in Selma in 1990. What died was a community created by people of good faith who saw in Selma great promise and were willing to work toward that promise.

That community was killed by selfish and power hungry “activists” with an insatiable need to make their own mark on history regardless of the collateral damage.

I began writing this letter many months ago, but in some ways it has been 25 years in the making. I wrote it for two reasons.

First, for those of us who grew up in Selma between 1970 and 1990, it is important to preserve the memory of the Selma of our youth. Second, it is equally important that no one forget who is responsible for its demise.

John Lockett

Atlanta, Ga.