Letter from Alabama | Part 1: A bridge to the voting booth

My traveling companion is 12 years old, a child of my child. We are standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on a Sunday in February. It was on this bridge on another Sunday, in 1965, that civil-rights demonstrators faced a sea of blue — blue helmets, blue uniforms, blue police cars — and were engulfed by a wave of officially sanctioned racial violence.

Today, the bridge is a study in the ordinary, buzzing with traffic. "People still use that bridge," my granddaughter says, marveling. "They drive over it every day. I wonder if they know what happened here."

We are here, Emma Rodriguez and I, because she wants to see the places she has been studying in her sixth-grade class at Brookside Elementary in Shoreline: the bridge in Selma, where the marchers were gassed and beaten; the church in Birmingham, where the four little girls were killed; the Capitol building in Montgomery, where the governor promised "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." She wants to know how things have changed.

Change has rolled across Alabama "like a mighty stream," to borrow a phrase made famous by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Half a century ago, the state was governed by a rigid system of apartheid. Most African Americans were denied the right to vote. Signs reading "Whites Only" and "Colored Only" delineated who could drink from which fountain, enter which door, eat in which restaurant, sit on which side of the bus station. Blacks — and whites — who challenged the status quo could expect violence.

Today, both Selma and Birmingham have black mayors. Montgomery — the city where Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus — calls itself the "Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement." Voters in this year's Democratic primary in Alabama overwhelmingly chose a black man as their presidential nominee. The next day, a cartoon in the Birmingham News depicted a triumphant Barack Obama standing next to the tombstone of Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham's infamously brutal police commissioner, shown spinning in his grave.

Change has also washed over Seattle, the city of my youth. In that Seattle, black people could not buy houses in most neighborhoods; try on clothes in some of the downtown department stores; swim wherever they wanted; have lunch in Frederick & Nelson's Tea Room. The Coon Chicken Inn — where the entryway was a grotesque caricature of the head of a grinning black bellboy — did a good business on Lake City Way until it closed in the late 1950s. Well into the 1960s, "whites only" policies prevailed in many hotels, restaurants and nightclubs, as did informal "sundown laws," which meant a black man walking after dark in a white neighborhood was likely to be stopped and questioned by police.

Standing on the Pettus Bridge with Emma, I wonder if the river of time and distance between Seattle and Selma is as wide and deep as I once thought.

The bridge is six blocks from the Brown Chapel AME Church, the starting point for what is now the 54-mile Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. The trail commemorates the people and events that led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

On March 7 of that year, about 600 people gathered at the church to begin a march to protest black disenfranchisement. African Americans comprised more than half the population of Selma at that time but only about 1 percent of the registered voters. The protesters made it only as far as the bridge before they were dispersed by tear gas and billy clubs in what became known as "Bloody Sunday."

They tried again, two days later, this time led by Martin Luther King Jr. They walked to the bridge, knelt, prayed, and turned around. On March 21, they left again, under protection ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Frank Johnson. They arrived at the Capitol building in Montgomery on March 25. The Voting Rights Act was approved four months later.

Joseph Smitherman, the mayor of Selma during the marches — who once referred to Rev. King as "Martin Luther Coon" — held on to that office for 36 years. He was finally defeated in 2000, by a black businessman named James Perkins. One of the streets the demonstrators walked down has been renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Street. It intersects with Jefferson Davis Avenue.

Things have changed, but not entirely. The birthdays of Davis, the Confederate president, and Robert E. Lee, the general who commanded Southern troops during the Civil War, are state holidays in Alabama. The Civil War is often called the "War for States' Rights."