George Evans, the mayor of Selma, Ala., steered clear of playing the race card in a recent interview, writes the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley.
In his opinion piece, Riley highlights the fact that Mayor George Evans did not give in to a National Public Radio interviewer’s tactic of tying Selma’s history dealing with race issues to today’s race relations.
“Ferguson, Mo., in 2015 is not Selma, Ala., in 1965. Black people in America today are much more likely to experience racial preferences than racial slights,” Riley writes. “The violent crime that is driving the black incarceration rate spiked after the civil-rights victories of the 1960s, not before. And if voter-ID laws threaten the black franchise, no one seems to have told the black electorate. According to the Census Bureau, the black voter-turnout rate in 2012 exceeded the white turnout rate, even in states with the strictest voter-ID requirements.”
