The Edmund Pettus Bridge Renaming Campaign: The Name Still There

Edmund Pettus was a Confederate brigadier general, a United States Senator from Alabama, and the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. He died in nineteen oh seven. Thirty-three years later, Selma named a bridge over the Alabama River after him.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday in two thousand fifteen, with President Barack Obama walking across the bridge alongside John Lewis and other surviving marchers, the campaign to rename it gained national attention. Activists and legislators proposed new names: John Lewis, Amelia Boynton Robinson, or simply the Freedom Bridge. Congress received petitions. The Alabama legislature considered the question.

Neither body acted. As of twenty twenty-six, the bridge retains Edmund Pettus's name. The civil rights pilgrimage that brings tens of thousands of visitors to Selma each year crosses a bridge bearing the name of the man who built the organization that sent troopers to the far side of it on March seventh, nineteen sixty-five.

The bridge is a National Historic Landmark. The name is a state and local decision. Alabama has not made it. The debate itself documents something the commemoration industry tends to smooth over: that the people who use public monuments to honor their heroes and the people who use the same space to commemorate resistance to those heroes are sometimes standing on exactly the same ground.

John Lewis, who crossed the bridge with a fractured skull in nineteen sixty-five and who crossed it again in two thousand twenty, weeks before his death, said he preferred to think of the bridge as redeemed. He said the name had been overcome by the history made on it. That may be true. The name is still there.