City Pol: I’m Just Like the 1965 Selma Civil Rights Protesters Beaten on Bloody Sunday

City Commissioner Stephanie Singer: "Today, the weapons are not billy clubs and horses — they are the courts and the media."

Stephanie Singer: Like Batman, but with the moral stature of the Selma Civil Rights protestors. | Image from Singer campaign website.

Stephanie Singer: Like Batman, but with the moral stature of the Selma Civil Rights protestors. | Image from Singer campaign website.

City Commissioner Stephanie Singer is feeling pretty aggrieved right now. Aggrieved enough to liken her battle to get back on the May 19 primary election ballot — from which she was booted for not having enough nominating petition signatures — to that of civil rights protesters in Selma, 1965.

Singer writes in an email to her supporters:

On March 7th, 1965, one of the biggest turning points of the civil rights movement took place, Bloody Sunday on Edmund Pettis bridge. The individuals who took blows on that bridge were fighting not only for their own rights, but for the rights of all Americans. The heroes of Selma in 1965 were fighting for the people of Philadelphia in 2015. Today, the weapons are not billy clubs and horses — they are the courts and the media. The violence is not so blatant but in a city where one person in four lives in poverty, where mothers routinely fear for their children’s lives, where children are shunted from terrible schools directly into the prison system, in that city, violence rules.

As long as there is democracy, there will be those who try to take it away.

She goes on to ask for a $3 donation.

So, let’s recap. Singer, like those brave souls on Edmund Pettis bridge, is fighting for the rights of all Americans. She is being beaten by the courts and the media, which are really basically the same as billy clubs and horses.

Citified has, blessedly, not followed Singer’s ballot qualifying fight all those closely. She may well have been unjustly booted. It was certainly a close thing. She’s still fighting to get back on the ballot, and that’s her right and it’s just fine. But Selma? The comparison is ludicrous, and it’s part of a self-aggrandizing pattern with Singer, who once told me: “Democracy gives the people a chance to take things back, and I think we saw that with FDR, and I think we saw that with Barack Obama, and I think you saw that in my election.”