The Parallel Lives

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, some 600 nonviolent, civil rights activists, mostly black, gathered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, intending to march to Montgomery, Alabama, the state capital, a distance of 54 miles, to demand their constitutional right to vote.

     Jim Crow laws had erased the black peoples’ right to vote decades ago. The whites ignored the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed a citizen’s right to vote.

     At the bridge, white state troopers and county deputies came at the protestors with batons and tear gas. Fifty activists received injuries on “Bloody Sunday.”

     Almost four years later, in early January 1969, across the Atlantic, in the northern part of Ireland, in the city of Belfast, nonviolent activists decided that they too would march, to Derry to demand their civil rights: the right to vote, to fair housing, and an end to gerrymandering.

     On January 4, nearly 300 loyalists, mostly Protestants, armed with stones, sticks, and iron bars, ambushed the roughly 400 marchers, mostly Catholics, at Burntollet Bridge, 6 miles from Derry. Thirteen marchers required medical care, and in Derry that night riots broke out.

     A crucial difference. The outcomes of the two marches ended on different pages. 

     On March 15, 1965, after hearing about the Selma, Alabama attack, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress and demanded an immediate passage of voting rights legislation. He said, “Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.”

     Congress did pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and LBJ signed it into law on August 6. This act removed barriers that had excluded black people from voting: poll taxes, literacy tests, and economic reprisals. It put teeth into the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution.

     It also allowed federal examiners to canvas neighborhoods and to “register voters in areas with historical discrimination.” In sum, the American people and their Federal government enfranchised black citizens, gave them the right to vote.

     But in Ireland, a thirty-year civil war, called the Troubles, engulfed Northern Ireland. Some 3700 people died and tens of thousands were maimed between January 1969 and April 10, 1998, a Good Friday, when the combatants signed the Belfast Agreement.

     Why the Troubles? Why the bombings, the assassinations, the guns, the rock-throwing?

     On December 6, 1922, the British government permitted self-rule to the isle of Ireland as “a self-governing dominion of the British Commonwealth.” Of the 32 counties in Ireland, 26 received independence, but 6 counties in the north chose to remain inside the United Kingdom.

     The Republic of Ireland is Catholic, and many Irish in the late twentieth-century wanted the entire island to fly the tricolor flag of Ireland: green, white, and orange.

     The Irish Republican Army, the IRA, were nationalists, those who wanted to unite the 6 counties in the north of Ireland with the other 26, but the 6 counties had a mostly Protestant population, with a Catholic minority, and the two factions, often lived side-by-side. 

     Centuries ago the English migrated to the north of Ireland and brought with them their Protestant faith. Soon, the British Protestants controlled the 6 counties, held most of the power, and called themselves loyalists, because they wished to remain loyal to the UK, to the Queen. 

     The English Protestant loyalists discriminated against the Irish Catholic nationalists, who lacked access to housing, to jobs, and were subjected to rampant gerrymandering, redrawing electoral boundaries to ensure Protestant control of local councils. This enraged the Catholics.

     To achieve some peace, the British Army built Peace Walls, iron and concrete structures, that segregated Catholic from Protestants neighborhoods within Belfast.

     They stand today, making Northern Ireland a very segregated state, a relic of the Troubles.

     St. Patrick’s Day arrives next week, on Tuesday.