If history teaches us anything, it is that if the rule of law is to have any meaning and value, it cannot be conscribed to paper.
This article was originally published on March 7, 2025 in the Law and Society Newsletter.
March 7-25, 2025, marks the 60th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches. Brave demonstrators traversed the 54-mile highway on three separate occasions, determined to shine a light on persistent racial inequality and the obstruction of voting rights for African Americans. On March 7, 1965, 600 marchers crossed the now infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge—only to be met by law enforcement officers on horses, wielding and violently using batons.
Among the marchers were children, pregnant women, and men. The violence was intense and indiscriminate.
March 7 became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Largely, this reflected the gravity of the atrocity. The bloodied faces. The broken bones. The terror of the dogs. The lack of political will and courage. The brutality, captured by film and photography and witnessed by the world, exposed that a beautifully written constitution espousing freedom, liberty, equality, and citizenship, if left in the hands of weak, indifferent, and corrupt men and women, could be rendered inconsequential and meaningless to those who held power.
In essence, Bloody Sunday exposed that the commitment to principles of constitutionalism were more deeply felt and held in the breasts of those who dared to march than by those who sought to obstruct voting rights—whether in the state legislature, federal government, or law enforcement.
Bloody Sunday captured the chilling blows and enduring horrors experienced by African Americans who simply believed that, if the constitution had true meaning, their equality must be made real rather than illusory. The fact that law enforcement could engage so unlawfully sparked questions about respect for the rule of law in Alabama. Questions about what it means to be a citizen on paper, but not in real life.
One year before Bloody Sunday, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It was a bold response to lingering violence, hatred, and Jim Crow laws that limited where African Americans could eat, shop, live, be educated, work. Jim Crow laws in some states barred African Americans from swimming in pools and strolling through the parks that their tax dollars paid for. These laws were intended to intimidate and demean—banning Black people from even playing checkers and chess publicly, or bowling and playing billiards.
As the United States tussles with false notions of merit and tropes about race and sex inferiority, one can only ponder the intelligence behind such invidious laws and the men who drafted them.
[The marchers] understood that without an honest reflection on law and society, and actions taken to further justice, inequalities may not only emerge but, like a formidable weed, persist.
Bloody Sunday exposed how laws can be weaponized in the furtherance of harm, division, and discrimination. The marchers understood that stereotypes and stigmas may embed in law and take decades, if not centuries, to root out. With the southern agrarian economy at their backs, the marchers knew that vile laws often protected cowardly men. They understood that without an honest reflection on law and society, and actions taken to further justice, inequalities may not only emerge but, like a formidable weed, persist.
Today, that wisdom springs forth with the power of history as a guide. Illegal executive orders seeking to thwart the constitution and trample the rule of law hark back to the injustices of the past. They have no place in law, and undermine safety and security in society. The targeting of free speech, birthright citizenship, sex and gender equality, racial justice, and environmental safety are notable concerns of these times.
As efforts to dismantle the institutions that uplift education, protect health, guard food security, advance environmental safety, and more come into full view, important questions emerge for our courts, state and federal legislatures, attorneys general, and university presidents and deans. If history teaches us anything, it is that if the rule of law is to have any meaning and value, it cannot be conscribed to paper. Rather, it must have real force as a foundational principle in a well-functioning and healthy democracy.
The marches from Selma to Montgomery represented one place of battle for equality; today, in the academy, there is another. The current attacks on academic freedom and research around the world and in the United States cannot be denied. From bans on books addressing colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment, the Holocaust, women’s equality, and same-sex equality, to the gutting of federal funding for scientific and medical research—academic freedom, which must be understood as a civil liberty and civil right, is eroding.
In the coming weeks and months deans and presidents will be called upon to respond to this moment, one that challenges scientific research and integrity, freedom of speech, and academic freedom. These responses will serve as a bellwether of academic integrity into the future.
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