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From white sheets to spreadsheets
Fifty years on from the dramatic events of Selma, Greg Palast shows that black US voters are still being systematically disenfranchised

I hate to spoil a happy ending. The movie Selma, like last week’s commemorations of Martin Luther King Jnr’s march from Selma, Alabama, 50 years ago, celebrates the US’s giant leap from apartheid.

Half a century ago Alabama state troopers and a mob of racist thugs beat African-Americans and others as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demanding no more than the right to vote.

By the time King led 25,000 demonstrators singing We Shall Overcome into the state capital Montgomery on March 24, the president of the United States had introduced the Voting Rights Act. Free at last — to vote. Roll credits.


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