New Kids on the Block

A new kid has come to Selma.

The signs are unmistakable, though I tried my best to ignore the "Selma Interpretive Center Coming Soon" poster hanging on an old building on Water Street, less than a block from the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I walked past the building almost every day when I first got here last month, but I didn't give it much thought at first. It was impossible, however, to miss the Ranger Roy types who attended the Bridge Crossing Jubilee wearing khaki uniforms and large hats. Yes, the government has moved to Selma and they're bringing millions of dollars with them to build a shiny, new museum dedicated to the local Civil Rights Movement.

What's that you say? Selma already has a museum that serves that purpose? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Nevertheless, the new "Interpretive Center" is coming and I'm not sure what it means for the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, which sits less than a block away from the new place. Now the NVRMI, dedicated to the people who fought the government for their civil rights, has to worry about being taken out by a government-funded museum. Does that qualify as "ironic" or is it just plain sad?

For those of you who have never been to Selma or the NVRMI, let me give you a little background. It's a grassroots museum dedicated to what tour director Joanne Bland calls "the people who marched behind Martin Luther King, Jr." They were the foot soldiers whose names are usually left out of the grand narrative, people like Annie Cooper and Marie Foster, who were organizing in Selma long before the TV cameras arrived. Bland herself attended mass meetings with her grandmother as a child and went to jail for the first time when she was only eleven-years old. Now she gives tourists first-hand accounts of Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery March when they visit the museum. She even gives walking tours, complete with a march across the bridge. It's an unforgettable experience.

One of my jobs here is to organize a media archive in a little room on the second floor of the museum. Since working in there, I have found pictures of Ms. Bland giving tours to people as different as Louis Farrakhan, Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Chris Tucker and MC Hammer. Yesterday I found a snapshot of her with a man who I swear is Stephen King. I know it seems that with all these rich or influential people visiting (o.k., maybe not Hammer these days), the NVRMI should be swimming in cash. Well, it's not, and it desperately needs more funding to stay afloat. Oh, and did I mention that the museum has over 300 hours of interview footage of people involved in the Movement in the Alabama Black Belt? With a little money and some elbow grease, these oral histories could make the museum one of the most valuable historical archives of the Civil Rights Movement in the country.

But will this new “Interpretive Center” eat into the tourism that keeps the NVRMI open and make their financial situation even worse?

Any thoughts on this? I'd love to hear what some of y'all think about this situation.