We Still Ask, “How Long?”
My parents participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a protest that culminated in Lyndon Johnson’s signing the Voting Rights Act, 60 years ago on August 6.
In Alabama, as she and my father marched into Montgomery, my mother was pregnant, carrying twins. It was a moment of heroism for them both, but it was also a moment of hope. In the shadow of the Alabama State Capitol, they heard Martin Luther King, Jr. intone those famous words, “How long? Not Long!”
That was March 1965. And “How long? Not long,” was a prophetic statement. By August of that year, Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act.
My mother, Margot Mindich, has lived a life of political activism, even co-managing a congressional campaign in 1970, one of the only women of her time to do so. At 90 years old now, her days of marching for civil rights are challenged by her difficulty walking long distances. But I march and she’s one of two women who I imagine are marching with me in spirit.
The other woman is Ida B. Wells. I’m a scholar who studies journalism history and one of my areas of research is how the press covered lynching and civil rights in the 1890s. She is the focus of my research and also my greatest historical heroine.
Wells did more than any other American to lead the campaign against lynching in the 1890s and she continued the fight for civil rights until the end of her life in 1931.
I march with the two women symbolically at my side, but the lives they lived couldn’t have been more different. After my mother and her parents escaped the Nazis in 1941, she lived in a time of increasing civil rights.
But Wells, after being born to enslaved parents in 1862, lived in a time of troubles and diminishing rights. By the time Wells was a teenager, the Reconstruction period, which had seen real strides in civil rights for African Americans, ended abruptly.
Wells fought tirelessly, but basic rights were rolled back in her lifetime. First, federal troops protecting Black lives were withdrawn in the 1870s, allowing the rise of lynching in the south. Wells fought for federal anti-lynching legislation, but it never came in her lifetime. In the early 1880s, she fought losing battles with railroads when she refused to give up her seat; in 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson codified those and other Jim Crow laws. The 16th Amendment protecting voting rights for Black men was ratified in 1870, but that right was then rolled back until that August day in 1965.
As my fellow marchers and I march these days in support of protections for immigrants, people of color, transgender soldiers and all vulnerable Americans, we would do well to remember that progress is not guaranteed.
Wells, walking beside me in spirit, reminds me that the stakes are high: despite our activism, rights can be rolled back, sometimes for nearly a century. Unlike my mother, she never got to see anything like the 1965 Voting Rights Act for her people.
Not long ago, my grown children and I retraced my parents’ steps in Alabama and stood at the spot where Martin Luther King, Jr. told those weary marchers, “How Long? Not Long!” The words are no longer a prophesy we can count on. When will we see a repeat of that signing of landmark civil rights legislation as we saw 60 years ago? When will we see the tide turn from an era of backsliding civil rights to hope? We don’t know. But the march continues.
David T. Z. Mindich is a professor of journalism at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. Before becoming a professor, Mindich worked as an assignment editor for CNN and earned a doctorate in American Studies from New York University. He has written articles for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. He is the author of three books, including Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism.
