Title :   “Walk A Mile In Our Shoes”

Year :  2015

Medium : oil on canvas 🔴 original sold private collector ( hand crafted custom frame ) Due to the very limited number of limited editions available I ask that you contact us about purchasing and size options

THERE IS AN OLD SAYING: “YOU CAN’T REALLY UNDERSTAND ANOTHER PERSON’S  EXPERIENCE UNTIL YOU’VE WALKED A MILE IN THEIR SHOES.”

The Perspective

In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register black voters in the South. During January and February, 1965, King and SCLC led a series of demonstrations to the Dallas County Courthouse. On February 17, protester Jimmy Lee Jackson was fatally shot by an Alabama state trooper.  In response, a protest march from Selma to Montgomery was scheduled for March 7.

Six hundred marchers assembled in Selma on Sunday, March 7, and, led by John Lewis and other SNCC and SCLC activists, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery. Just short of the bridge, they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, the officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent protesters with billy clubs and ultimately hospitalizing over fifty people. “Bloody Sunday” was televised around the world.  Martin Luther King called for civil rights supporters to come to Selma for a second march.

When members of Congress pressured him to restrain the march until a court could rule on whether the protesters deserved federal protection, King found himself torn between their requests for patience and demands of the movement activists pouring into Selma. King, still conflicted, led the second protest on March 9 but turned it around at the same bridge. King’s actions exacerbated the tension between SCLC and the more militant SNCC, who were pushing for more radical tactics that would move from nonviolent protest to win reforms to active opposition to racist institutions. On March 21, the final successful march began with federal protection, and on August 6, 1965, the federal Voting Rights Act was passed, completing the process that King had hoped for

 Narrative Points

1. The Newspaper from the morning of March 7th, 1965, It’s interesting that Russia and racial injustice still headlines the news fifty years later.

2. The checked box embedded in the shadows beneath the marchers feet. Please vote.