Ainka and Josiah Jackson sat inside Ainka’s office at the Selma Center for Truth, Nonviolence and Reconciliation with the Edmund Pettus bridge looming large in the window behind them.

Selma was days out from the annual jubilee commemorating Bloody Sunday, when civil rights leaders and foot soldiers crossed the bridge and protested their lack of voting access.

But this year was different. Nearly two months before, on Jan. 12, an EF-2 tornado hit Selma, destroying roughly half of the city’s residential neighborhoods and over 600 structures. Residents hoped the commemoration would be an opportunity for the world and President Biden to see the storm damage and invest in their community’s recovery.

Ainka, as part of her role as the executive director of the SCNTR, conducted training workshops in preparation and showed visitors around her hometown.

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Her son Josiah sometimes volunteered with the center during jubilee weekends, but mostly stayed home. The celebration feels more like it’s for vendors and visitors, he said, and he’s not sure how much they can actually help this year.

“We have to invest, well, Selma people have to invest in themselves before the outside comes in,” Josiah said.

“Do you see how he took himself out of that?” asked Ainka, pointing out how Josiah excluded himself from ‘Selma people.’

The city has never felt like home for Josiah – a marked contrast from his mom sitting next to him in a “I Love Selma” t-shirt. A senior at Selma High School, Josiah is eager to leave the city behind when he graduates this spring.

“I don’t think I’ve ever liked Selma since moving here,” he said. “Once I graduate and go to college, I’m not coming back except to visit my family.”

As the community recovers, at the center of those efforts is not only how to rebuild equitably and resiliently in the face of history and the threat of another natural disaster, but also how to keep young people like Josiah invested and engaged in Selma following decades of population loss and disinvestment.

“If we’re going to rebuild, if we’re going to recover, it will take the efforts of all, not just some,” said Felecia Lucky, president of the Black Belt Community Foundation, which has partnered with the mayor’s office and SCNTR to establish a recovery fund to help rebuild parts of Selma and Dallas County that were decimated by the storm.

“While we would never have wished that the tornadoes were here, the greatest gift can come from what will happen because they came.”

The latest disaster

After the January storm, community members rallied to help one another with food drives, supply deliveries and FEMA applications.

Vulnerable communities across the southern U.S. are facing devastating natural disasters, sometimes repeatedly. Before the January storm, Selma was recovering from the 2020 Hurricane Zeta. And just this past week, another tornado, part of the same system that destroyed rural Mississippi towns, landed in nearby Marion before tracking away from Selma.

“I was talking with some of my colleagues from New Orleans about disaster recovery, and they were just saying they were exhausted,” said Lucky, who attended a Climate Disaster Summit days after the tornado. “But you don’t see any of that, you know, folks are still continuing to grind through for the betterment of what our community needs.”

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Fatal tornadoes hit southern U.S.

Ainka’s organization along with the BBCF have led fundraising efforts and provided direct services for people in Selma, including helping residents access food, housing, medical treatments and mental health care.

“We already had a mental health care shortage in Selma and it’s just even worse now; like everything, we had problems before that have just grown since the tornado,” said Ainka in the first weeks after the storm.

She wants to rebuild towards the Beloved Community first imagined by the civil rights leaders who marched through Selma in 1965. They hoped for a community absent of poverty, hunger or hate that provides for the needs of the whole person.

She envisions “purpose-filled lives and purpose-filled employment for people.” A Selma “that gives life instead of takes it,” because relationships between community members are paramount.

But that vision has eluded Josiah, who feels his adolescence has been plagued by high crime rates and few opportunities for engagement.

Legacy of protests

Ainka spent her entire childhood in Selma until leaving for college at Spelman then law school at Vanderbilt. Josiah lived in Nashville until the fifth grade, when Ainka “felt called to come back home and do this work.”

Ainka knows the Selma she grew up in is different than what Josiah has experienced.

Both the schools and the city are very different – largely, Ainka said, due to an educational shift she helped organize.

In 1990, Ainka took part in a movement to protest tracking in Selma City Schools – a tiered curriculum that based students by ability, which was first implemented after desegregation.

Students in the lower tiers – where 95% of the district’s Black students were placed – could not take college prep classes and their grades were worth less than students in higher levels.

Noward Roussell, the district’s first Black superintendent, proposed reforms to the system; but in response, the majority white school board voted not to extend his contract.

“This vote has sent Selma back to the Pettus Bridge,” Rousell said after the school board’s vote.

Black members of the school board resigned their positions in protest. Families boycotted sending their kids to school. Ainka helped organize a movement of nearly two-hundred students to take over Selma High.

“I led my first march in the sixth grade…and that was organized exclusively by young people,” she said.

Amidst the protests, the board reinstated Roussell but did not change their policies on tracking.

The next school year, there were 600 fewer white students enrolled in the city school system, according to “Why The Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma,” a book by Karlyn Forner, who said the board’s actions and protests during the 1989-90 school year marked “the death of integrated public education in Selma.”

After the schools crisis most white parents enrolled their children in private schools. Today, there are 30 total white students in Selma’s public schools, although the city’s population is 13% white.

When Josiah took the ACT last spring, he was surprised by the number of white students in the room with him.

“I think over all the years I’ve been here, from the three different schools that I’ve been at while I was here, I’ve probably only seen six white students,” said Josiah. “I was surprised to see them there.”

Local disinvestment

Selma is the fastest shrinking city in the state of Alabama. Since the 1965 marches that helped secure the nation the right to vote, the city’s population has dropped 58%, and by 14% in the last decade alone.

The population decline, hastened by white flight and the Craig Air Force Base closure in 1977, has caused many businesses and community centers, such as the Brown YMCA, to permanently shutter.

“Things shifted from sixth grade to 12th grade. But things shifted even more after I left. And when I came back to visit, I wouldn’t stay here more than 24 hours, because the level of hopelessness was so thick, the level of depression was so thick,” said Ainka.

At the time, things were so bad she thought she’d never return home either.

The population decline only reversed once in the early 2000s, after Mayor James Perkins, the city’s first Black mayor, was elected.

Perkins says that change happened primarily because he was able to engage young people, by visiting each school, talking with children and holding listening sessions.

He would start those sessions by asking students to raise their hands if they planned to stay in Selma after graduating. Only one or two hands would go up during the first sessions, but as time went on, more hands were raised.

Between 2000 and 2010 the population grew by .2% – the first and only recorded census gain in decades.

“One of the things I know we were able to do was to change the attitudes about our community by making certain that people really understood Selma. That those of us who actually live here really understood what we have,” he said.

The most important thing he did, he said, was help convince Hyundai manufacturers to add job positions, with the goal of giving young people more opportunities. But even those facilities are 40 minutes away in Montgomery.

One of Selma’s main economic drivers has always been the tourism that comes from the Bloody Sunday commemoration events. This year’s Jubilee brought in approximately 30,000 people, according to Sam Walker, one of the event organizers, who participated in the original march himself as a sixth grader.

But aside from the tourists who come and spend money in restaurants and hotels, Josiah feels that history has little impact on his life and on Selma today.

“I feel like I’ve heard you or your sisters say, where has this history gotten us?” asked Ainka.

“Besides the knowledge I have of what happened here…I can’t say anything,” Josiah responded.

Walker realizes today that the struggle for voting rights that he participated in wasn’t enough.

“A lot of people felt that some of those other conditions would be changed because of that one struggle because of how hard the struggle was to get the right to vote. People thought that those other rights was gonna come attached to that new law – that you will be treated differently in those other areas,” said Walker.

“But we wake up 30 years later and realize that struggle only dealt with voting. It didn’t deal with those other issues – the economic issues, education issues, and there was no meaningful struggle around them so you didn’t make any real progress on those issues.”

Crime, safety concerns

In 2020, the Selma Times-Journal reported “though other cities in the state record far more murders each year, Selma has struggled to shake its reputation as one of Alabama’s most dangerous cities and a year-to-year increase in murders stands to make that work even more difficult.” That year, there were 10 murders in a city of less than 20,000 people.

Josiah mostly keeps to himself to avoid “the nonsense.” But it still finds its way to him.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend get killed or anything of that sort until I moved here. Here, seeing fights in schools is natural; hearing about people you knew and went to school with dying is natural and happens frequently. Seeing teachers die. I’ve never seen this amount of violence before I moved here,” he said.

The anxiety of growing up around gun violence is the thing Josiah is most eager to escape. It’s a fear that creeps in small, subconscious ways.

“For me it is like I’ll pull it up to this place or I’m going somewhere, let me not put my car in park, let me just hold my foot on the brake just in case something happens. Just small stuff like that,” he said.

“I just prefer not to go places. Like if I feel like something could happen, I would just rather stay at home.”

According to Dr. Diedra Baker, a physician at Selma Family Medicine, fear and anxiety are common among young people who have experienced gun violence or live in communities with high crime rates. Often, she notes, the health of a community is reflected in the health of young people.

“I think in every community the health of the community definitely depicts our children’s growth, their outlook, their dreams or visions,” she said.

Dallas County District Judge Vernetta Perkins said during a town hall on March 20 that the storm has had a ‘tragic’ impact on young people.

“Students that have gone through COVID and have missed two or three years of school now have all kinds of issues – they can’t read, they can’t write,” said Perkins. “All of these things happening on top of now not having anywhere to live and now the ones that are in my court room on top of all that don’t have anywhere to go for detention.”

The Dallas County jail and juvenile detention center took a direct hit from the tornado. Inmates were moved to seven other detention facilities throughout the state as officials work to repair the damage.

“I hope we can have real community engagement around how we can reimagine justice for young people, which is a much larger conversation than what happens in the courtroom. That can be housing, economic development, workforce development, career paths, all of these pieces,” she said.

A vision for the future

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, a native of Selma, has held a series of community listening sessions beginning last week where residents were asked to share their dream for Reimagining Selma.

Residents shared visions of a river walk on Water Street, more businesses and local restaurants, affordable housing and brand new public housing units to replace the crumbling GW Carver Homes where many of the movement’s aging foot soldiers live today.

“Leon’s! Kayser’s!” residents called out, remembering the closed shops on Broad Street where they once bought their Easter dresses.

Selma has the money to potentially realize these dreams because of federal and state funding that has come into the community since the tornado.

The federal government agreed to an initial 100% match of cleanup costs, which ended on Mar. 18. The mayor predicted earlier this month that about 70% of the debris had been removed.

FEMA approved $6.7 million for households and individuals and the Small Business Administration has provided $6.9 million in assistance to businesses.

Sewell said an unnamed federal agency has agreed to fully pay for a comprehensive strategic plan – a new vision for the city and surrounding Dallas County.

No estimated cost has been given for the strategic plan. Prior to the storm, Selma had an immediate infrastructure need assessed at $500 billion.

“The nation owes Selma this,” Sewell said.

During the 58th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”, President Joe Biden acknowledged both Selma’s importance in history and promised to support the city in its recovery as long as it was needed.

“We know there is work to do to recover from this,” he said of the storm. “We’ll be here as long as it takes.”

Sewell believes this is a transformational moment for Selma that will provide young people with jobs and new opportunities for engagement.

“But if we build it, will you come?” she asked the crowd at the community meeting, who responded resoundingly that they would.

For Josiah, who is headed to Atlanta this fall to study computer engineering at Morehouse College, the answer is no.

“At this age, it wouldn’t really matter to me what they did, I still wouldn’t say. But if I was younger, if they added things to do where you didn’t have to drive 45 minutes to an hour and a half to go do something fun, maybe it would be different,” he said.

Ainka doesn’t blame her son for wanting to leave.

“On a drive back from visiting Atlanta, he told me what it was like for him growing up here and the level of violence being here. I went from being sad that he was about to graduate and go to college to I can’t wait for my baby to be able to leave,” she said.

Ainka’s hope for reimaging her hometown is to create Boomerang Selma, a program that would invest in young people to go to college and then return and use what they learned to help serve their community.

“Young people need to be exposed to other things and see other possibilities to know how to dream,” said Ainka. “I do think Selma will change the world again with that knowledge. And I think part of the reason why we had not just no deaths from the tornadoes, but also no injuries, is because we need all hands on deck to help us transform.”

“And who knows what he’ll do in the future,” she said of Josiah as she turned to look at the Edmund Pettus bridge once more before leaving to conduct another workshop. “I never thought I’d come home and here I am.”