A woman exits a house in a dilapidated residential complex adjacent to the former Craig Air Force Base in Selma, Ala. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
SELMA, Ala. — Their homes would almost certainly be among the first thing that President Obama would see upon arriving in Selma.
The 102 small brick structures had once been base housing for pilots training at Selma’s long-ago shuttered Craig Air Force Base.
Now the vast majority of the homes were uninhabitable, stripped clean by looters or charred by fire. The rest were residences of last resort for those who could barely afford the $175 a month rent.
The president was coming to Selma on Saturday to pay homage to the courage of protesters who, 50 years ago, while demonstrating for the right to vote, had endured savage beatings by club-wielding state troopers. Before he would speak, Obama’s helicopter was scheduled to land on Craig’s runway, where a presidential limousine would be waiting to ferry him to the festivities at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Iasha Gadsden, 32, gazed out at the road that Obama would travel as he exited the old air base. What would the president think as he rolled past the post-apocalyptic landscape? The dozen or so homes that were still occupied had roofs that leaked when it rained, broken windows covered in cardboard, and in several instances, no working plumbing.
“He’ll probably see some of the cars parked out here and wonder, ‘Do people live out there for real?’” Gadsden said.
Nearby, Latoya Davis, 29, nodded. “As long as he’s looking out his window, he can’t miss it.”
From 1940 to 1977, thousands of future fighter pilots had passed through Craig Air Force Base on their way to battlefields in Europe, Korea and Vietnam. The fliers and their families occupied the neat, identically built brick homes, shaded by towering oaks and stately magnolias. When the Craig closed, the city sold off the base housing to a developer who rented the sturdy, little homes to blue-collar black families. The housing development was renamed for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the confederate general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The residents shortened the name to the less offensive “NBF.”
“It was nice back then,” said Doris Tolbert, 49 whose aunt and uncle lived in one of the houses, some 30 years earlier. “We used to celebrate Christmas out here every year.” Tolbert is a Head Start teacher in Prattville, Ala., about an hour’s drive from Selma, and was back in town to hear Obama speak. When she saw the homes from the road, she decided to pull over and see if she could find her relative’s old home. But the homes are too decayed for her to be sure.
“The city should fix these up or tear them down,” she said. “Someone needs to do something.”
These days the development, which is owned by the son of a former Selma mayor, doesn’t get many visitors. Even the garbage collectors stopped coming, said residents. The school bus, however, still makes regular stops. Monique Randall, 10, and Montel, 12, clambered down the bus steps and headed for home. They hustled past one of their neighbors who stood waist-deep in an overflowing dumpster, searching for aluminum cans.
A few yards away were the remains of a raccoon that another neighbor had carefully gutted and cooked for dinner.
Earlier in the day Monique’s class had walked together across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Martin Luther King had knelt in prayer and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) suffered a fractured skull at the hands of Alabama State troopers. She watched as workers assembled a stage for the president’s speech and television reporters did live standups.
In less than 24 hours the president’s limousine would be speeding right past her door.
What would happen if he stopped? “I don’t know,” she said, running off to grab her bike.
A few doors down, one of her neighbors offered a different answer. “He’d probably be disappointed,” she said.
Greg Jaffe covers the White House for The Washington Post, where he has been since March 2009.
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