Speaking at Selma: Presidential Commemoration and Bill Clinton's Problem of Invention

On March 5, 2000, President William J. Clinton spoke in Selma, Alabama, to a large audience gathered to remember the thirty-fifth anniversary of one of the civil rights movement's most significant and violent episodes. In doing so, he became the first sitting U.S. president to speak at Edmund Pettus Bridge. In fact, to date he remains the only chief executive to speak at the site of "Bloody Sunday," the name given to the historic events of March 7, 1965, when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked U.S. citizens. There may be many reasons why Pettus Bridge has not been visited by presidents before or after Clinton, but one of them is surely the political awkwardness of remembrance when what is being remembered is state-sponsored violence and the deeply felt racism that invited it, quite literally in this case. The painful events of 1965's Bloody Sunday were famously captured in now-iconic images of state troopers dressed in full uniform, eager to crack skulls with state-issued weapons, and later, hovering over defenseless victims. To the extent that such images are not merely distant memories in Alabama or elsewhere in the United States, the story of Selma can evoke both fresh and unhealed wounds related to racial inequality. Even if a presidential visit to Selma after 1965 might have had the capacity to signify some progress made, it might also have drawn attention to just how far the nation still had to go, making it easier, perhaps, for presidents to stay away. Indeed, a series of recent exceptions may prove the rule. During the 2008 presidential election, when, for the first time in U.S. history, one of the most viable candidates was black, suddenly Selma became an important campaign stop. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spoke at Pettus Bridge in March, 2007, and John McCain appeared in Selma over a year later as part of his "American's Forgotten Cities" tour in April 2008. Selma was no forgotten city to Bill Clinton, though, just as it was quite famously known to--and through--another Democratic president before him. President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) had not been physically present there in the spring of 1965, but his swift rhetorical attention to what happened on Pettus Bridge on March 7 is often associated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that summer. In years since, Selma--the actual place as well as its name as a signifier for the events of Bloody Sunday and their consequential aftermath--has been featured within nationalistic narratives about the United States' figurative march toward political and social equality. In his second inaugural address, for example, Barack Obama gestured toward the emancipatory telos of the country's mythic mission by referencing Selma, as well as two other locations, as evidence that "(w)e the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal--is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall" (Obama 2013). In this context, a reference to Selma can signal a belief in a particular version of U.S. nationalism, one imbued with an almost mystical inevitability: the idea that, somehow, the nation will ultimately reach its storied goal of providing "justice and liberty for all" of its citizens. Likewise, for scholars of U.S. political discourse, Selma may also bring to mind another, closely related story. Just as the city's name can be shorthand for a narrative about how U.S. democracy is supposed to evolve, it can also bring to mind a theory about how presidential rhetoric is assumed to function. That is, LBJ's use of "the bully pulpit" as part of his administration's response to Selma has provided scholars with an example of the "rhetorical presidency," wherein a president's strategic rhetorical intervention in U.S. politics by way of public speech is among the factors contributing to legislative and/or policy success (Tulis 1988). Long after most of LBJ's individual words were forgotten, then, what has been remembered about Selma is that the president spoke out, in public, decrying the racial violence done there and offering a policy proposal as part of the solution. …