That's John Lewis getting the billy-club treatment in Selma, Alabama, March 1965.
His skull was fractured when police went berserk.
This should have been an easy one. That it wasn't
speaks volumes.
Scores of U.S. lawmakers are converging on tiny Selma, Alabama, for a large commemoration of a civil rights anniversary. But their ranks don’t include a single member of House Republican leadership — a point that isn’t lost on congressional black leaders.
It is the 50th anniversary of the Selma march, a pivotal point in the American civil rights struggle. You will no doubt recognize the picture above, of future congressman John Lewis being beaten by police, or the famous pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr. marching arm and arm with other leaders. They marched over the
Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a Confederate general and "Grand Dragon" of the Ku Klux Klan. They marched on the
Jefferson Davis Highway. They were met with tear gas and beaten with clubs. The March 7 march soon became known only as
Bloody Sunday.
None of the top leaders — House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy or Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who was once thought likely to attend to atone for reports that he once spoke before a white supremacist group — will be in Selma for the three-day event that commemorates the 1965 march and the violence that protesters faced at the hands of white police officers.
Not one? It is hardly prime fundraising season. It is commemorating an event of great importance in the American civil rights struggle. It is on a subject that each of the Republican leaders could stand to muster even a token show of support for, especially Majority Whip David-Duke-Without-The-Baggage.
The two possibilities are that either they are genuinely uninterested in the anniversary, despite politicians in general usually falling over each other for opportunities to show their bold leadership and upright moral values by standing on a stage somewhere with television cameras pointed at them from all directions, or that they feel that attending would not play well to the base, as the saying goes, because the Republican "base" has been in no mood of late to hear about racism, or voting rights, or civil rights, or why legislative victories won by the marchers and organizers of 50 years ago ought to be still protected today.
Take your pick, but this really should have been an easy one.
9:43 AM PT: Also skipping out: Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.