Her son Josiah sometimes volunteered with the center during jubilee weekends, but mostly stayed home. The celebration feels more like it’s for vendors and visitors, he said, and he’s not sure how much they can actually help this year.
“I don’t think I’ve ever liked Selma since moving here,” he said. “Once I graduate and go to college, I’m not coming back except to visit my family.” “I was talking with some of my colleagues from New Orleans about disaster recovery, and they were just saying they were exhausted,” said Lucky, who attended a Climate Disaster Summit days after the tornado. “But you don’t see any of that, you know, folks are still continuing to grind through for the betterment of what our community needs.
But that vision has eluded Josiah, who feels his adolescence has been plagued by high crime rates and few opportunities for engagement.Ainka spent her entire childhood in Selma until leaving for college at Spelman then law school at Vanderbilt. Josiah lived in Nashville until the fifth grade, when Ainka “felt called to come back home and do this work.”Both the schools and the city are very different – largely, Ainka said, due to an educational shift she helped organize.
“I led my first march in the sixth grade…and that was organized exclusively by young people,” she said.The next school year, there were 600 fewer white students enrolled in the city school system, according to “Why The Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma,” a book by Karlyn Forner, who said the board’s actions and protests during the 1989-90 school year marked “the death of integrated public education in Selma.
“Things shifted from sixth grade to 12th grade. But things shifted even more after I left. And when I came back to visit, I wouldn’t stay here more than 24 hours, because the level of hopelessness was so thick, the level of depression was so thick,” said Ainka.Children roller skate outside of a shuttered YMCA, 'the first in the South,' in downtown Selma. March 7, 2023. Savannah Tryens-Fernandes/AL.com.
Between 2000 and 2010 the population grew by .2% - the first and only recorded census gain in decades. But aside from the tourists who come and spend money in restaurants and hotels, Josiah feels that history has little impact on his life and on Selma today.“Besides the knowledge I have of what happened here…I can’t say anything,” Josiah responded.“A lot of people felt that some of those other conditions would be changed because of that one struggle because of how hard the struggle was to get the right to vote.
RepTerriSewell
RepTerriSewell Can she stop voting to give all that money to Ukraine and use it on our cities instead?
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