Terrified teenagers on street corners in downtown Birmingham, forced against brick walls by the painful force of a water cannon or recoiling from biting police dogs. A state trooper beating down a young, kneeling John Lewis on the far side of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, as mounted officers begin a brutal charge. A Greyhound bus engulfed fully in flames outside Anniston, Alabama — a symbol of white rage against integrated Freedom Rides.
Imagery has already been the lens through which we’ve viewed America’s never-ending struggle for civil and human rights. For me and my peers who grew up in the baby boom era, in the shadow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1960s’ end of legal segregation and the wholesale denial of Black voting, there was a subtext to those grainy pictures or film clips in black-and-white: that this was history, that we had overcome the time of blatant suppression.
That’s why the bodycam videos released out of Florida this week — showing the utter shock and confusion of citizens, predominantly Black and also mostly Democratic, handcuffed by cops and dragged off to jail over alleged voting crimes under an Orwellian squad created by Florida’s ambitious and authoritarian governor, Ron DeSantis — are so shocking to watch.
