Holly Bailey

FRANKLIN, Tenn. — For Tennessee Republicans, Williamson County has long been considered the promised land — one of the reddest counties in what has increasingly become one of the reddest states in the country.

An affluent suburb south of Nashville, Williamson is idyllic, with quaint main streets and rolling green hills where some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War took place. But in state politics, it is regarded as the land of surrender for Democrats, a county so firmly controlled by Republicans at every level that the other party often barely competes.

Just one Democrat has won here in the last 20 years — and as it happens, that candidate, former Gov. Phil Bredesen, was back in town on a recent Monday afternoon looking for votes. Nearly eight years after leaving the governor’s office, Bredesen, 74, recently emerged from political retirement to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker, the moderate Republican and off-and-on critic of President Trump who announced last fall that he would not seek reelection.

Bredesen is not just any other Democrat in Tennessee. One of the most popular public officials in state history, the former Nashville mayor and businessman won two terms in the governor’s office and was the last Democrat to win a statewide election in this firmly red state thanks to a broad base of bipartisan support. His surprise decision to jump into the race in December put Tennessee’s Senate campaign on the national map, giving Democrats a slim chance at regaining control of the U.S. Senate this fall and an opportunity to reestablish a foothold in a region where the party has been largely wiped out.

But on the campaign trail the former governor rarely, if ever, mentions his own party affiliation. And he pointedly ignores questions about the national significance of the race. Unlike other Democrats this election year who have placed their opposition to Trump at the center of their campaign, Bredesen, a political centrist, has strenuously worked to avoid being cast as a member of the resistance. When Bredesen does mention the president, it is to declare, as he did in a recent campaign ad, that he is “not running against Donald Trump” but rather “to represent the people of Tennessee.”

Bredesen’s careful middle-of-the-road approach is a study in contrast with his likely opponent: U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a hard-charging, eight-term member of the House with one of the most conservative voting records in Washington.

A regular on the 24-hour cable news circuit, Blackburn, 65, has been one of Trump’s most passionate allies. And she has made that loyalty to the president front and center in her Senate bid, embracing him and his agenda in ways that other Republicans have not during this closely watched midterm election year. “People want to have a U.S. Senate that’s going to support the president,” Blackburn has said. “I will stand with President Trump.”

In a video announcing her Senate bid last fall, Blackburn, whose home district includes Williamson County, came out guns blazing, telling voters about the pistol she packs in her purse. She declared war on her own party, calling out Senate Republicans who “act like Democrats or worse,” and ticked off the ways she would support Trump’s agenda, including on immigration.

Describing herself as “hard-core” and “politically incorrect and proud of it,” Blackburn embraced her reputation as a conservative firebrand. “I know the left calls me a wingnut, or a knuckle-dragging conservative. And you know what? I say that’s all right, bring it on.”

In an equally fiery speech in late February to Williamson County Republicans, Blackburn, who still faces a likely primary challenge, blasted unnamed Democrats who would dare think they could try to win the Senate seat or any other race in this staunchly conservative state. “They think they can turn Tennessee blue. But they’re not even gonna turn it purple because they are running into the red wall, and the red wall starts right here in Williamson County,” Blackburn declared.

Bredesen’s visit to Williamson County came just a few days after Blackburn’s speech.

While he made no mention of his likely opponent, his stop seemed to be a quiet, but pointed effort to suggest that “red wall” she talked about wasn’t so impenetrable.

The former governor sat at a packed table of about a dozen people right in the front window of Puckett’s Grocery, a popular local eatery barely two blocks from Blackburn’s district office in downtown Franklin. The group included some prominent Republicans like Aubrey Preston, a developer and philanthropist from Franklin who has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to GOP candidates, including Blackburn. But he was also part of a “Republicans for Bredesen” group during the former governor’s last campaign. Bredesen filmed his campaign announcement video at Preston’s home.

The conversation focused on local issues like land preservation, a hot topic in this rapidly developing part of middle Tennessee. Meanwhile, Bredesen’s first ad had just launched on local television and on cable networks including Fox News. It featured Bredesen talking up his record as someone who had “worked across party lines … with Democrats and with Republicans” — bipartisanship he emphasized when talking to voters here.

A fiscal conservative known for his moderate approach and willingness to work with Republicans, Bredesen won his 2006 reelection race by a landslide, capturing 70 percent of the vote in what even then was a strongly red state. And in that race, he did what no other candidate had done before or since: He carried all 95 counties in the state — including Williamson County, a particularly surprising victory since that’s where his GOP opponent was from. “Even Jesus would have had a hard time carrying 95 counties” in Tennessee, Rep. Jim Cooper, a “Blue Dog” (moderate) Democrat whose district includes Nashville, joked at the time. But that was 12 years ago.

While early polls in the Senate race suggest voters remember and still like him, Bredesen faces a political landscape that is dramatically different than when he last ran for office. Elected Democrats have gone nearly extinct. And though the state had a long tradition of electing moderate lawmakers from both parties, pragmatic politicians like Bredesen have mostly retired or been voted out.

It raises the question of whether a candidate, even one as widely admired as Bredesen, can persuade voters in an era of unprecedented political polarization to look beyond party labels on Election Day.

The race is sure to have broad national implications, beyond the battle for control of the Senate, in which Democrats need to win just two additional seats to regain a majority. Tennessee’s race will help answer whether the electorate still wants lawmakers who can govern in the middle.

Bredesen says his gut tells him there are people like him who are tired of what he describes as “the super-hyperpartisanship” that has torn the country apart and left Washington at a standstill. Even so, he admits to polling to make sure he wasn’t embarking on a “suicide mission.” The results were promising enough to persuade him to jump into the race, but they didn’t suggest an easy path to victory. He readily admits this will be a harder race than any he has run before.

Not only will Bredesen have to win over a wide swath of Republicans across the state, including voters who voted for and continue to back Trump, he will have to do so while also energizing and holding support among Democrats who may be more conservative than in other states but still want to see a candidate who is willing to take on Trump more aggressively.

Still, the 74-year-old ex-governor, who had long resisted entreaties from Democrats to take on other campaigns over the years, felt an almost moral obligation to make the race. “No one can fix Washington,” he said, “unless you try.”

Bredesen never saw Trump coming. But he was less surprised than most when the former reality television star rode a populist wave of support from rural and working class voters into the White House in 2016. He had been warning his own party about losing ground among that electorate for years.

As governor, Bredesen had sensed resentment building among voters who felt left behind by both political parties. When the economy went south in 2008, in what would later be known as the Great Recession, the unemployment rate rose as high as 20 percent in some parts of Tennessee.

At the time, Bredesen reached out to lawmakers in Washington from both parties as they looked for answers. “I thought there was nobody in that town who had any idea what it was like for these people lying in bed at night and just seeing all these things that they had hoped for, for themselves, for their families, just sort of disappearing because of some crazy Wall Street banker somewhere,” he said.

Nobody, Bredesen said, seemed to truly grasp “the fear and frustration” felt by working-class Americans who have never fully recovered even as much of the rest of the nation has rebounded back. He has been particularly critical of his own party, describing Democrats as “tone-deaf” to voters in small-town America, who tend to be more culturally conservative and who turned out for Trump in droves.

“The Democrats, nationally, have done a great job of alienating a lot of voters with this kind of holier-than-thou superiority about a certain type of voter,” Bredesen said. “What was Hillary [Clinton]’s term? Oh yes, deplorables.”

Long before the era of Trump, Bredesen had been sounding the alarm for Democrats on the party’s messaging. In the summer of 2007, he appeared before the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a group of party centrists who had gained influence during Bill Clinton’s presidency, where he said Dems desperately needed to find a way to reconnect with rural and blue-collar workers, especially in the South.

“If you asked me what the Republicans stand for, I could tell you in about 25 words: a traditional view of family, a central role for faith, low taxes, an assertive and combative view of American interests abroad,” Bredesen said at the time. He went on: “I challenge you to describe what the Democratic Party stands for in 25 words. You can’t do it. We’re just defining ourselves by what we’re not. We’re just criticizing the failure of others.”

History shows that the Democrats recaptured the White House in 2008, but the party continued to lose ground, and congressional representation, in states like Tennessee. Today, even the DLC no longer exists, having closed its doors in 2011.

Eleven years later, Bredesen offers a tight smile when asked about the speech and the suggestions he made to his party back then. “We didn’t do that, and Donald Trump is president,” he said matter-of-factly.

In a state where Trump won by 26 points, Bredesen is noticeably careful about how he talks about the president. He has repeatedly told reporters he does not want to be perceived as running against Trump — a line that eventually made it into a campaign ad in which the former governor, speaking to someone off camera, insists that he could find common ground with Trump and “separate the message from the messenger.”

“There’s a lot of things I don’t personally like about Donald Trump, but he’s the president of the United States, and if he has an idea and is pushing something that I think [is] good for the people of Tennessee, I’m going to be for it,” Bredesen declared in the campaign ad, a variation of what he often tells voters on the trail.

The ad did not mention any specific Trump policies, and Bredesen so far has not detailed areas of common ground between him and the president. He often pairs his Trump critiques to complaints about dysfunction in Washington in general.

“I don’t like the way this country and the way the media in this country has made everything about that person,” Bredesen said in an interview, referring to the president. “I think of Donald Trump more as a symptom than a first cause. And I think that symptom is that we as a party, … [and] a lot of Republicans too, have been tone-deaf to a lot of people who have been affected by globalization and technology and have got real concerns.”

Bredesen is quick to add that he doesn’t “have all the answers or solutions.” But in a subtle critique of Trump that is characteristic of his tone in the race, he added, “I think there are certainly better answers than demonizing every immigrant or starting trade wars or something like that.”

In some ways, Bredesen is an unlikely messenger for Red State Democrats. He’s not even from Tennessee. A Yankee transplant, he’s a native of Shortsville, N.Y., a small town 30 miles southeast of Rochester. While running for governor, he neutralized what could have been a liability in a state where rural voters are instinctively suspicious of outsiders by turning that detail of his biography into a plus. He explained to rural voters how he had grown up poor in a small town just like theirs. His father had left the family when he was a kid, so he and his mother, who worked as a bank teller, lived with his grandmother, who kept the family afloat by doing alterations and sewing.

But he went to Harvard (on a scholarship) and left rural New York for Boston in the mid-1960s. But Bredesen insists the mindset of a small town guy has shaped his years in public life. “While I live in an urban area now, I am basically a rural person,” he said.

Many of his relatives back in New York had voted for Trump and still support the president. “I don’t look at that as, ‘Well only racists or crazy people do that,’” he said. “I look at it as lots of reasonable people in this world are so estranged from what is happening in Washington that they want to see something different.”

A science whiz who was obsessed with space, Bredesen earned a degree in physics in 1967. After graduating he became a computer programmer, and after a brief stint in London moved to Nashville in 1975 with his wife, Andrea, a registered nurse who worked for a hospital management company. In 1980, working from a computer in his den, Bredesen founded HealthAmerica, a company that acquired and ran health management organizations. As he often tells voters, he went $10,000 into debt launching the company, but by the time he sold it in 1986, it was a $700 million a year company with 6,000 employees and traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

The sale made Bredesen rich. A financial disclosure form filed last week as part of his Senate campaign offered a broad view of his personal wealth. The former governor reported he held investment assets ranging in value between $88.9 million and $358 million between January 2017 and February 2018. And he reported income from $3.3 million to $20.1 million during the same period — an overall net worth that would make him one of the richest members of Congress if elected.

His strength as a candidate is that he doesn’t come across as a rich guy or an elite businessman. While he tends to do more listening than talking — once describing himself as “the strong silent type” — he is calm and measured, without being stuffy, and speaks the language of everyday Tennesseans.

Bredesen frequently mentions the “Walmart test” he has applied throughout his own career and has encouraged others in his party to adopt. In it, he imagines how a voter in Walmart might react if he tried to sell them on a policy. “I just imagine myself stopping a couple in the aisle of a Walmart in Winchester, Tenn., or someplace like that, and explaining to them what I was trying to do, and why and so on,” he explained. “If I could see them nodding their heads, they don’t need to agree or disagree, but if they were saying they could at least understand what I was trying to do, I felt like maybe I was on the right track.”

The former governor has also presented himself as an avid sportsman and a strong supporter of gun rights. During his first bid for governor, Bredesen scored political points when he took a sporting group up on its offer to demonstrate his trap shooting skills alongside his Republican opponent, who didn’t show up. The National Rifle Association gave him high ratings — until he vetoed a bill allowing guns in bars. “Alcohol and guns just shouldn’t mix,” he said at the time. His veto was overridden by the Republican-led state legislature.

While he still mentions his support for the Second Amendment, and wore a hunting vest for the video in which he announced his candidacy, Bredesen has more recently endorsed tougher gun laws, including stronger background checks. But he has stopped short of saying he wants to ban the kind of assault rifle used in the Parkland, Fla., attack. In a race likely to attract heavy spending from outside groups, that may be enough to keep the NRA from an all-out attack on Bredesen.

Public polling in the Senate race has been scant so far — and mostly from partisan sources — but all suggest a tight contest between Bredesen and Blackburn among likely voters heading into November.

Perhaps the best indicator of the closeness of the race came in recent weeks when word leaked that some Republicans, both in and out of Tennessee, were pressing Corker to reconsider his decision to retire. They reportedly voiced concerns Blackburn may be too conservative to win independents or could alienate mainstream Republicans, who have broken with their party to back Bredesen in the past. In February, Colleen Conway-Welch, the widow of Ted Welch, a major Republican donor, made headlines when she hosted a fundraiser for Bredesen.

Last month, Corker confirmed that he had considered reentering the race, but said he was sticking with retirement, though he declined to endorse Blackburn. He has said he should remain neutral ahead of the August primary. But some have wondered if he will endorse in the race at all because of his friendly relationship with Bredesen, who has known Corker, a former mayor of Chattanooga, for years.

The ex-governor says he spoke to Corker “numerous” times about the Senate race when he was still deciding whether he would run. He wanted to make sure Corker was really out of the race. And he quizzed him about what serving in the Senate is really like and whether he would enjoy it, telling reporters that Corker knows him well enough to gauge his “frustration” level. “We’ve been friends a long time,” Bredesen said.

There has some buzzing in GOP circles about the remote chance that Corker might endorse Bredesen over Blackburn — given he is more politically aligned with the centrist Democrat than the conservative Republican congresswoman. But a GOP consultant close to Corker, who declined to be named to speak more freely about the race, doubts that would happen. “More likely, he would just remain silent, but his silence would say everything to the Howard Baker wing of the party,” the consultant said, referring to the late Republican senator and former aide to Ronald Reagan who championed bipartisanism. Blackburn, he said, “will need real help there.”

In numbers that have been seized upon by Bredesen and his supporters, a recent Vanderbilt poll found that Tennessee voters tend to be more moderate than recent election results might suggest. According to the survey, about 62 percent of those polled said they regarded their fellow state residents as “conservative or very conservative.” But 48 percent said they viewed their own political leanings that way — a 14-point difference between perception and reality. Thirty-one percent of those surveyed described themselves as politically moderate.

Blackburn has one important ally: Trump, who has a 48 percent approval among Tennessee voters, according to the Vanderbilt poll — much higher than his average approval rating nationwide. But as in other parts of the country, Trump has lost ground in Tennessee. His approval was down 12 points compared to November 2016. In a potential warning sign for Blackburn and other Republicans here, the poll found just 35 percent surveyed felt Trump is changing Washington for the better, a 24-point drop since he was elected.

The same survey found little public thirst for some of the red meat issues that Trump championed during his first 14 months in office, including a crackdown on illegal immigration. Just 6 percent of those polled said the issue should be a top priority for Trump and Congress. Fifty-eight percent said illegal immigrants in the country should be allowed to stay and work, while 72 percent said they support allowing the children of illegal immigrants to be eligible for the in-state tuition rate at Tennessee colleges and universities — numbers that have increased since Trump was elected.

“It’s not clear to me that the right wing is still as strong in the state as some people think,” said John Geer, a Vanderbilt political scientist who helped oversee the poll. “They write letters, and they attend rallies, and they call their representative, but the state still has a strong pragmatic brand.”

Even many Republicans are skeptical Blackburn can go after Bredesen as a flaming liberal Democrat who would fall in lockstep with GOP boogeyman like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. But she’s trying. Her campaign already regularly refers to the ex-governor as “the No. 1 recruit” of Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader from New York and leading Trump critic who played a role in convincing Bredesen to join the race. Republicans argue that whether Bredesen is a moderate or not, he would be a reliable vote for the Democratic agenda.

But Bredesen dismisses the critique he would just be another Democratic foot soldier. “People know me,” he said. “I’ve got a good record of not being that way.”

He points back to his time as governor, when he worked with Republicans to balance the state budget. During that era, he made what he still describes as the most heart-wrenching decision he ever made as governor — trimming 200,000 people from the rolls of TennCare, the state’s Medicaid system for the elderly and the poor. It was a politically treacherous choice, but one later credited as saving the program.

His experience with TennCare and trying to figure out health care in the state later made him a leading critic of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which he complained would put a huge fiscal strain on states. Though he reiterates that he does not support an outright repeal of Obamacare, Bredesen has said he is running in part to fix the law and plans to unveil a series of policies later this year aimed at bringing costs down and shoring up the plan — not unlike what he did with TennCare.

He knows that many lawmakers before him have headed to Washington with good intentions, only to get mired in the swamp. He frequently cites a Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, as lawmaker he admires for trying to rise above politics and make deals, as the kind of senator he would like to be, but he doesn’t have “delusions” that things will be fixed overnight.

But in reemerging at this place and time, Bredesen also admits he “sure wouldn’t mind” showing Democrats how to win again with rural and blue-collar voters who used to be the party’s base. Few listened to him 11 years ago, but maybe they will now.

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Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., who preached nonviolent resistance to oppression and war, was shot to death in Memphis. He was 39 years old. He left behind a wife and three children and a nation still riven by the divisions he had devoted his life to healing. Yahoo News takes a look back at his life and his legacy in this special report. Jonathan Darman assesses King as a man not without flaws, but with a passion for justice and a conviction that grace can still be found here among us sinners on earth. Senior Editor Jerry Adler looks back on the fateful last year of King’s life, beginning with his electrifying, and controversial, Riverside Church address against the war in Vietnam. National Correspondent Holly Bailey goes back to Selma, Ala., whose poverty moved King to increasingly turn his focus to economic justice, and finds not much has changed in the years since. Reporter Michael Walsh looks at how King almost died in an attack a decade earlier, and how the knowledge of his mortality shaped his ministry and message.

SELMA, Ala. — Joanne Bland was just 11 years old in 1965 when she joined some 600 men and women in a march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge here. She was among those who were beaten when state troopers acting on orders from Gov. George Wallace charged the group, attacking them with cattle prods, billy clubs and tear gas.

She was already a veteran activist. Her grandmother had been taking her to civil rights meetings since she was 8, and her church, Brown Chapel AME, was the headquarters for activists fighting for social justice. Though she was not even out of middle school, Bland had already been arrested at least 13 times, taken to jail alongside adults and other children during mass protests over the town’s treatment of black residents.

Fifty-three years later, Bland vividly remembers the screams of terror she heard that day, the squeals of charging police horses, the blood spilling onto the bridge roadway. With her eyes stinging from tear gas, she stepped over people lying so still she thought they were dead. She remembers being knocked down and hitting her head on the pavement, feeling something wet on her face. She thought it was her older sister’s tears, but it was her sister’s blood, dripping from a gaping head wound.

“I thought they were going to kill us all,” Bland recalled.

The nightmarish images of Bloody Sunday, as that dreadful March afternoon came to be known, were broadcast around the world and proved to be a turning point in the fight for civil rights.

Two weeks later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had skipped the Bloody Sunday march amid threats on his life, would lead roughly 3,200 people on a historic four-day march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, culminating in a rally of nearly 25,000 people in front of the state Capitol. That summer, with King at his side, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, a landmark bill that prohibited racial discrimination in voting, continuing the progress initiated by the Civil Rights Act a year earlier.

Back in Selma, Bland and others rejoiced, thrilled by what the new law could mean for them and their town. They imagined a more diverse political landscape for their city, which back then was almost equally divided between blacks and whites. They foresaw a city government that included black elected officials and believed other positive changes would follow, like more economic opportunity for African-Americans to own homes or start their own businesses. They finally saw their own path to the American dream. “We had just had this major victory,” Bland recalled. “We were so high.”

Five decades later, Bland, who is now 64, looks at her hometown and sees a city that once made history but has seemingly been left behind by it. As she sees it, “Selma is dying,” suffering a slow, agonizing decline that has been heartbreaking and frustrating for people like her who have fought so hard to keep it alive.

While Selma finally has the black representation that many here dreamt of in the 1960s — including a black mayor, a majority black city council and a black congresswoman — the town has struggled amid white flight, a sinking economy, high unemployment, rising crime and troubled schools.

The once bustling storefronts along Broad Street in downtown Selma, where she and fellow activists made history, are now mostly empty and still. The old department store is gone, many restaurants too. The city’s oldest neighborhoods, with their quaint old cottages and 19th-century mansions framed by towering live oak trees, are interspersed with burned-out houses and vacant lots full of tall weeds and trash.

Slideshow: The marchers are long gone from Selma, Ala. The poverty persists. >>>

On the streets near Bland’s neighborhood, countless homes are boarded up — but they aren’t necessarily empty. Here in a city that ranks as one of the most impoverished communities in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, many people are so poor that even homes that would be considered uninhabitable in other towns are still in use by families who have nowhere else to go.

Bland tries hard not to feel bitter when she looks around Selma, a town that spilled its own blood for the civil rights movement but has seemingly gotten little in return. Winning the right to vote wasn’t enough to spare Selma from the social and economic ills that have driven the community and others like it across small-town America into desperation. It’s a downturn largely driven by the loss of industry and jobs, but a struggle that has been felt more acutely in Selma and in other towns along the so-called Black Belt of the Deep South, which has long been one of the poorest regions in the nation and never felt the economic upswing when the rest of the country was booming.

“Selma gave so much to the world, and nothing has been given back,” Bland said. “We have the history, and that’s all.”

And part of that history is the unfulfilled promise of Dr. King, who turned his focus to the plight of small towns like Selma in the final months of his life. In February 1968, three years after Bloody Sunday, King returned to Selma, taking the pulpit at the Tabernacle Baptist Church on Broad Street, where he had pushed those who led the march for civil rights to embrace an even more ambitious “era of revolution.”

Ending segregation and earning the right to vote was just one part of the battle toward equality, King told the crowd. The next step was to take up the plight of America’s poor and reverse economic injustice that was keeping people from having a better life, including there in Selma. “Believe in your heart you are God’s children,” King told the congregation. “And if you are a child of God, you aren’t supposed to live in any shack.”

King called his revolution the Poor People’s Campaign, and he envisioned a movement of poor people from all races coming together to demand a living wage and better access to education and health care. He also wanted to pressure state and federal leaders into doing more to encourage economic development in rural America — not just by creating jobs but also by making sure communities had access to basic amenities like grocery stores and hospitals.

While King took his campaign to big cities like Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and Washington, the civil rights leader spent most of the final weeks of his life traveling across the rural South, where he believed his campaign would have the most impact. It was also where King still had a base of supporters, a crucial detail amid criticism by some in the civil rights movement over his decision to wade into more politically treacherous debates. In April 1967, he had come out against the Vietnam War — a move that was frowned upon by some of his allies, who thought it was diverting attention from the fight for civil rights. His campaign for economic justice was also viewed with suspicion by those who thought it was shining a light on a problem for which there was no easy solution.

King envisioned a rally in Washington that would rival the 1963 civil rights march on the nation’s capital, where he said poor people would camp until federal lawmakers did something about poverty. In the spring of 1968, he visited some of the poorest places in America to rally support for the march, making trips to Selma and remote rural parts of Alabama. He also traveled through the Mississippi Delta, making stops in places like Batesville, Greenwood and Marks — a tiny town in the heart of the state’s cotton belt where many families were so poor they could not afford to buy their children food to eat. In an earlier visit, in 1966, King had broken down in tears after he watched a teacher at a daycare center cut an apple into sections to feed her desperately hungry students, realizing it was all they had to eat.

As he planned his Poor People’s Campaign, King resolved that his march to Washington would begin in Marks, which was then the poorest town in the poorest county in the poorest state in the country. The marchers would travel to D.C. in a caravan of mule-drawn wagons, a potent symbol of the poor black farmers in the South. But King did not live to see it happen.

On April 4, 1968, he was killed by an assassin at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. While supporters ultimately did converge on Washington that June, occupying a settlement they called Resurrection City, the Poor People’s March and King’s dreams of transforming the lives of impoverished people, especially in the Deep South, largely faded away.

It’s hard to know what ultimately would have happened with King’s war on poverty had he lived, or what he would make of the state of the nation today, where the divide between the rich and the poor is even more extreme, and where the places he tried to champion face even more dire conditions than they did 50 years ago.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Selma, where the town is smaller, more segregated and poorer than it was during King’s day. Its population of roughly 28,000 in 1960 was down to less than 19,000 in 2016, according to U.S. Census estimates. While the town was roughly split between blacks and whites during the civil rights era, Selma is now about 80 percent black. That divide is more extreme in the public schools, where 99 percent of the student population is black.

The average income in 2016 was $23,283, roughly half of Alabama’s median household income. More than 41 percent of the town lives below the poverty level, according to the U.S. Census, more than three times the national average and one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. Among children under 18, the percentage living in poverty is nearly 60 percent.

In the past 50 years, the town has lost hundreds of jobs, as textile and other manufacturing plants have closed and the agricultural sector has declined. One of the biggest blows came in 1977, when nearby Craig Air Force Base, a pilot training facility and airport that once had a population of nearly 5,000 and contributed millions to the local economy, closed its doors.

Like other small towns, Selma has suffered under state and federal spending cuts, including in agriculture, education and health care. It has been forced to try to do more with less. And with much of the population living below the poverty level, local tax dollars haven’t been there to help the city invest in and improve conditions that might help it attract new industry.

“Black Selmians have fought so hard to try and create economic opportunities, to make the most of the vote, to really improve things for themselves, but they keep fighting with a dwindling pool of resources. It just gets smaller and smaller and smaller,” said Karlyn Forner, a Duke University historian specializing in civil rights who wrote a book about the city’s plight, “Why the Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma.” “The economic abandonment has been so deep for so long, it’s just an impossible task to be able to solve it [without outside help].”

Outside of downtown, area shopping centers are full of vacancies, including the old J.C. Penney, which closed four years ago. Many buildings sit in empty decay — monuments to a more prosperous time. One of the biggest employers, besides an International Paper plant on the east side of town, is the local Walmart.

While the unemployment rate in Selma has dropped to 8 percent — down from 13 percent in 2015 — few credit the number to people actually getting jobs. They believe many people have simply given up looking.

“To see our town go from the way it was to the way it is now, it’s ridiculous. Boarded-up houses, no jobs. I don’t care what you say, poverty is a form of violence, and people are hurting,” Bland said. “You tell a child that he needs to get a job, that he shouldn’t be waiting for a handout. But there are no jobs to be had. How do you justify that?”

But there is a new push to call attention to the struggle of Selma and the towns that King once championed. On a recent Friday night around the corner from where the Bloody Sunday march began 53 years ago, a few hundred people packed the pews of the First Baptist Church in Selma as a group of activists plotted the revival of the Poor People’s Campaign to try to force the nation to address the tricky question of poverty, just as King had so many decades ago.

The group was led by Dr. William J. Barber II, a black minister and civil rights leader from North Carolina, and Dr. Liz Theoharis, a Presbyterian minister originally from Milwaukee who has spent years working with the poor. Also onstage were other well- known civil rights leaders, including Rainbow Coalition founder Jesse Jackson. Jackson had worked on the original Poor People’s Campaign and was in Memphis with King when he was assassinated.

Collectively, they spoke of initiating a “moral revival” in the nation, with an agenda that includes living wages, health care, criminal justice reform and clean water and air. The campaign also criticizes the nation’s “war economy,” in which the U.S. spends more money on military action overseas than rebuilding communities at home — an issue that even Donald Trump flicked at during his 2016 bid for the White House but has largely ignored as president.

Earlier in the day, Barber and Theoharis had toured some of the poorest areas around Selma, including a rural community in neighboring Lowndes County not far from the historic route of the 1965 voting rights march. They visited homes occupied by the poorest of the poor in the region, where many homes lack sewage systems, leading raw waste to openly flow into yards and often back into the drinking water. That has led to an outbreak of E. coli and hookworm, an intestinal parasite and disease of extreme poverty that is more typically found in developing areas of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

A United Nations official visiting the region last December as part of a forthcoming study on extreme poverty told a local reporter that conditions in Lowndes County and other parts of Alabama’s Black Belt were among the worst he had ever seen in the developed world.

“And this plays out in many communities across the country, but especially the rural South,” Theoharis said later. “This kind of disease and a lack of public health and desperate poverty connected to it… And this is America.”

Two days after the meeting in the First Baptist Church, Barber and Theoharis gathered a couple of blocks away on the steps of the Brown Chapel AME, where hundreds of people had converged to mark the 53rd anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march. An annual event, the Selma Jubiliee, as it is known, includes the re-creation of the march from the church to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. President Barack Obama participated in the march in 2015, and this year the group included nearly 100 members of Congress. Among them were Sen. Kamala Harris of California, who is often rumored as a possible future presidential candidate, and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, the storied civil rights leader who was beaten on Bloody Sunday.

This year, organizers for the new Poor People’s Campaign were determined to use the annual march to call attention to poverty and other problems facing Selma that have long been ignored by the politicians who descend on the city every year to mark the town’s civil rights history. They fanned out with big yellow signs and handed out fliers, which advertised a planned 40 days of activism beginning in May and leading to a June 23 march in Washington, D.C., modeled after the original Poor People’s Campaign.

But in a series of speeches by civil rights leaders and politicians before the march, the issue of poverty was all but ignored — until Barber took the microphone. He recounted the extreme poverty he had seen among local residents in recent days and criticized politicians who seemed unwilling to even try to tackle the subject, even as they came to march on Selma’s hallowed ground.

“What would Dr. King think?” he said.

In the crowd that day was Joanne Bland, who spends most of her days giving tours to outsiders who come to Selma to learn about the civil rights history that happened here. She loads the visitors up in a van and takes them to the Brown Chapel AME and then drives them to the Edmund Pettus Bridge and then to the other side, where the marchers were first attacked.

But Bland also shows outsiders “the ugly” parts of Selma, the crumbling factories east of downtown that ceased operations long ago, the surrounding neighborhoods with burned-out houses and vacant lots where people deal drugs in the middle of the day and where there has been open warfare among local gangs. She wants them to see what has become of her city.

“I’m not ashamed to show it to them, ’cause sometimes you have to play on the guilt,” she said. “You have to make people feel guilty. We gave you so much. Now look at us. Help us.”

The reactions are often the same, she said — how Selma shouldn’t be like this, how a city that played such an important role in civil rights should be lit up and thriving, how a city that paved the way for politicians like Obama and Harris and Cory Booker shouldn’t be so forlorn. But then they leave, and nothing happens.

In some ways, Bland followed a similar path. After graduating from high school, she moved to New York for college and later joined the Army and was stationed in Germany. Returning to the U.S. in 1989, it was her intention to live in New York — “the big city,” she says — but a visit back to Selma changed her mind. She was troubled by the decline of her hometown and felt drawn to try to do something.

In addition to local activism, she helped found the National Voting Rights Museum and organized the first Selma Jubilee to re-create and commemorate the Bloody Sunday march, building on the city’s historical tourism. But the city continued its long decline.

She still has hope of things turning around. And like Dr. King she has a dream — that one of the many visitors she talks to returns to Selma, buys a house or starts business and does something for the community. Then their friends would follow, and a city could be reborn. That’s why she keeps telling the story of Selma again and again, working day and night to call attention to what she calls a “blight on America.”

“To me social movements are like jigsaw puzzles — everybody has a piece,” she said. “My piece is teaching young people where we’ve been as a nation so they can improve upon what we already did.” But for Selma to survive, she said, “it’s going to take so much more than just me talking about it.”

You hear Chris Hondros before you ever see him, as he calmly takes a call as though it were any other day in the office. And for the late Getty Images photographer, it was. The battlefield was where Hondros worked, where his photographs came to sharply define some of the bloodiest conflicts of the last 15 years, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also be where he ultimately lost his life, killed in a 2011 mortar attack along with fellow photojournalist Tim Hetherington while covering the civil war in Libya six years ago this week.

But on this day in 2003, Hondros was in Liberia, answering his phone as he walked down the street with young militia members who were barely high school age but were now on the frontlines of a deadly civil war. In the chaotic footage that opens “Hondros,” a documentary about the photojournalist’s life and work which opens in select theaters this week and begins streaming online March 6, the photographer takes the phone call off camera, reassuring the person on the other end that all is well — even as his words are nearly drowned out by rapid bursts of machine-gun fire and blasts in the not-too-far distance.

“Things are fine,” Hondros casually tells the caller, his voice the very definition of ease. “Give me a call back in about half an hour.”

It’s only then that the viewer sees Hondros come into frame, camera in hand, calmly documenting the chaotic scene in the Liberian capital of Monrovia where militia members were squaring off against rebel forces determined to overthrow then Liberian President Charles Johnson. Even as other journalists began to turn back amid fear of escalating violence, Hondros continued on toward a bridge where some of the fiercest fighting was underway, crouching as bullets whizzed through the air. Within minutes, he took one of his best known photographs — an image of a young militia commander leaping ecstatically into the air, drunk on the glory of war, after firing off a rocket-propelled grenade toward rebel forces. The picture, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, is considered one of the most iconic images of modern war photography.

It was the story behind that photograph that was the genesis of “Hondros.” Greg Campbell, a journalist and filmmaker and author of the book “Blood Diamonds,” had grown up with Hondros in North Carolina and was the photographer’s best friend. While mourning his death, Campbell was surprised to receive a Facebook message from Joseph Duo, the young Liberian immortalized in Hondros’s photo, who told him of the larger role the photographer had played in his life.

Slideshow: Chris Hondros’s life and pictures highlighted in documentary, ‘Hondros’ >>>

In 2005, during a return trip to Liberia, Hondros finally met Duo, learning his name for the first time and his backstory. Duo, then 28, had dropped out of school in the 10th grade to go to war. Living in poverty with his wife and three kids, he told Hondros he was trying to go back to school in hopes of pursuing a better life, but it wasn’t easy for someone his age.

To Duo’s surprise, the photographer helped him enroll in school and paid the tuition, hoping that would allow the man to choose his own fate. The two subsequently kept in touch over the years, as Hondros reviewed Duo’s report cards and encouraged him to persevere. When Duo graduated from high school and enrolled in college classes in computing and criminal justice, Hondros continued to pick up some of the costs —though he told almost no one, including Campbell.

“I always knew that Chris made friends easily and kept them close at hand and really kind of cultivated his relationships but … I had no idea the actual scale of the impact that he had on people,” Campbell said.

Inspired to tell the story of his friend’s legacy and generosity, Campbell launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance a film about Hondros’s most famous photos and his personal and professional impact on his subjects and others who came to know him. The project found important backers in actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Jake Gyllenhaal, who eventually served as producers. Four years later, the result was “Hondros,” which premiered last year at the Tribeca Film Festival one day after the sixth anniversary of the photographer’s death.

Exclusive clip from ‘HONDROS’

The filmmakers interviewed Samar Hassan, an Iraqi teenager who was photographed by Hondros in January 2005 moments after U.S. soldiers opened fire on her family’s car, killing her parents. The image of Hassan, then only 5, screaming and covered in blood, was one of the most powerful images of the Iraq war and one of the first to truly capture the horror of the conflict for the country’s civilian population.

Yet the most powerful footage in the film is of Hondros at work, captured in war zones via found footage from other journalists who were on the scene. He moves quickly and with precision, always watching and looking for the best angle, the most dramatic framing.

The film shows Hondros in action as he takes some of his most famous images, including in Iraq and Libya, where the footage includes shots of the photographer working right up to the final moments before his death. Campbell and his fellow filmmakers had put out an open call for any imagery of Hondros at work, resulting in “hours and hours” of footage that had to be drastically edited. As the footage plays, it is spliced with still images pulled from the Getty Images archive of the photos Hondros was taking at the time.

“Probably one of the most challenging things was to find that footage and kind of turn over every rock, but it was also one of the most fulfilling,” Campbell said. “One of the most pleasant surprises was that you could actually see him at work in his environment and literally in some cases with the video camera over his shoulder as he’s taking photographs that came to be pretty iconic and very well-known from the conflicts that he covered.”

At times, Hondros narrates his own story, speaking about his work and the importance of photojournalism through snippets of various television interviews conducted before his death. At one point, an interviewer asks Hondros to respond to a claim that war photographers are “the craziest” of all journalists.

“The problem with war photography is that there’s absolutely no way to do it from a distance,” Hondros replied. “You have to be close. You can’t do it from your hotel. You can’t do it from across the street, from across the bridge. You have to be there. There’s really no substitute for that. So you have to figure out ways to get into the midst of things, no matter what’s happening. And you have to suspend your reason sometimes to do that.”

Campbell’s documentary comes at a difficult moment for journalism, especially for photojournalism. As print magazines and newspapers have scaled back or shut down, the ubiquity of smartphones has turned practically every passerby into a photographer, and professional photojournalists are finding it harder to make a living. And the wars they cover are growing increasingly brutal and dangerous.

While Campbell’s primary goal was to introduce viewers to his best friend, who was only 41 when he died, he also hopes “Hondros” will remind people of the importance of photojournalists, especially in covering combat in places like Iraq and Libya.

“Everybody with a phone on the planet can take a photo of what’s happening, but in order to take a photo that helps you understand it, it requires the skills and talents of a photojournalist,” he said. “Especially in this day and age where the very fabric of truth is being questioned from the highest levels … there’s no replacement for having experienced, skilled, well-trained people who know what they’re doing from a journalism perspective going into these environments, who are dedicating themselves and putting themselves at risk to come away with the truth or as close of an approximation as we can get to it.”

Throughout the film, it’s hard not to wonder what Hondros, who was just weeks away from getting married when he was killed, would be doing today. Many of the places he documented, including Iraq, are still being ravaged by deadly conflict. Campbell said it’s hard to tell where his friend’s life would have taken him, though he believes he would be on the frontlines somewhere, determined to show the horrors of war.

“One of his friends once said that his favorite photo of Chris’s was the one that Chris never got to take next,” Campbell said. “It’s interesting to kind of think about the possibility of what those photos might have been and the stories he would have been telling us.”

Cover thumbnail image courtesy of Scout Tufankjian.

SANTA ANNA, Texas — When Kevin Roman thinks about what happened at that tiny church in Sutherland Springs last November, he considers the clock: seven minutes.

That’s how long it took for a masked gunman to spray hundreds of bullets in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church during the Sunday morning service on Nov. 5, killing half the congregation of around 50 and wounding 20 others. Seven minutes is all it took to enact the worst mass shooting in Texas history and the worst ever at a church in the United States. Just seven minutes was all it took to rip out the heart of a tiny community, to inflict the kind of pain on families that will never heal.

Roman lives hundreds of miles away, in a tiny unincorporated West Texas town called Valera. Like Sutherland Springs, Valera is a blip on the map, a one-stoplight village of roughly 80 people where everyone knows everyone else. There’s a post office, a barbecue restaurant and the Valera Baptist Church, where Roman has been pastor for the last three years. The congregation of 30 or so meets Sundays in the small white chapel a few blocks off state highway 67 in heavily rural Coleman County that appears to have more cows than cops.

Last year, when the barbecue restaurant was robbed, it took the county sheriff almost 30 minutes to respond. Roman thought of the robbery on that fateful November morning, as he heard early reports of the massacre in Sutherland Springs. He considered the fate of his own church, smaller but equally remote. What would they do if a crazed gunman suddenly showed up on their doorstep? Would there be anyone to protect them? Could they protect themselves?

“Sutherland Springs was a punch in the gut because, out in the middle of nowhere, you forget about danger,” Roman said.

His congregants also watched the news and began to think about their safety. Some of the Sunday regulars began bringing their guns to church, including a woman who kept one in her handbag. Nobody talked about it. It just happened. They started locking the church door during services, and a man positioned himself in the last pew to keep watch. It still didn’t feel like enough.

Roman resolved to come up with a plan for how to keep his church safe in the event of the unthinkable. “Even if nothing happens, I didn’t want to be that pastor who wasn’t prepared,” Roman said.

On a recent Wednesday night, Roman found himself 15 miles down the road on one of the front pews at the First Baptist Church in nearby Santa Anna. He was one of about 50 small-town pastors and church congregants from around the region attending a $25-per-person seminar on church security taught by Jimmy Meeks, a retired police officer-turned-minister who travels the country advocating for churches to be better prepared for violent attacks like the one in Sutherland Springs. Unlike other church security experts, he makes little money on the ministry. The tickets usually cover his travel costs and that’s it.

Meeks calls his mission the Sheepdog Seminars, and in recent months, he’s been on the road almost nonstop, traveling to churches throughout Texas and as far away as Nevada, Florida, Kentucky and Ohio, called upon by pastors to spread awareness that not even the sacred house of God is immune from bloodshed in an era of seemingly endless mass shootings.

“What happened in Sutherland Springs, as horrible as that was, it was not unique,” Meeks said as he prepared to take the pulpit in Santa Anna. “Violence happens all the time in churches or on faith-based property, but for some reason, people in the church still operate as though this could never happen to them. (They say) ‘No, Lord, not at my church.’ And I say, ‘Don’t you remember Charleston? Don’t you remember Colorado Springs? Or Fort Worth? Don’t you remember this town or the other?’ People need to wake up.”

For almost three hours, Meeks, dressed in a Western-style shirt, faded jeans and cowboy boots, marched up and down the aisle of the small sanctuary in Santa Anna, alternating between the calm voice of the cop he used to be in the suburbs of Fort Worth, where he still lives, and a fire-and-brimstone preacher passionately trying to stir the church body out of what he describes as “complacency.” Invoking a litany of past church attacks, often with his voice choked and tears in his eyes, Meeks again and again warned that what happened in Sutherland Springs could happen anywhere, in any church, big or small.

Although recent headlines might suggest otherwise, it is still safe to go to church on Sunday morning. Unlike school shootings, the FBI does not keep a specific tally of acts of violence at faith-based institutions, so the research is largely left to outside experts. But given the millions of institutions of faith in the country, the ratio of deadly crime is, on average, small.

Since 1999, there have been around 1,700 “deadly force” incidents at houses of worship, including mosques and synagogues, according to Carl Chinn, a church security expert in Colorado Springs, Colo. Even though there are few incidents on average, church shootings are often high profile. According to Chinn’s data, roughly 1,000 of those deadly force incidents included the use of a gun, and in nearly 500 cases, someone was killed.

Experts say that what’s happening at churches is not necessarily a sign of growing anger at religion, but rather a sign that houses of worship are not immune from the rash of deadly shootings that seem to be growing in number in recent years. People like Meeks argue that churches need to be prepared and aware of what is happening in  the society around them.

“You need to be ready!” Meeks shouted. Citing the Old Testament story of David versus Goliath, he rejected the interpretation that the young warrior was an underdog who had simply overcome his enemy with the help of the Lord. David, he said, had “trained” to face his enemy — just as churches must now train and prepare for potential attacks.

“David was conscious of the threats,” Meeks declared. “Are you conscious of the threats?”

For churches, the more difficult question now may not simply be whether they are aware or even preparing for the threats. Just as Meeks’s schedule is crammed with dozens of seminars in coming months, consultants and other organizations that specialize in church security have been overwhelmed with training requests from congregations all over the country in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs as shaken churches grapple with the fear that  an attacker could target their place of worship. Some waiting lists are reportedly more than a year long, already scheduled well into 2019.

In Texas, the question of security has ignited a separate debate over how far a church should go in trying to protect the flock, especially small-town churches that can’t afford to hire police or professional security guards. Many law enforcement officials and security experts say it is a risk for churches to rely on volunteer security or gun-toting congregants who may not have the proper training to interpret a genuine threat or how to respond. But Texas officials, including state Attorney General Ken Paxton, have said what happened in Sutherland Springs is an argument for more armed parishioners since they may be a church’s only line of defense.

“We need people in churches … at least arming some of the parishioners or the congregation so that they can respond if something like this, when something like this happens again,” Paxton told Fox News on Nov. 5, hours after the Sutherland Springs shooting.

But even in gun-friendly Texas, where an open-carry law has been on the books since 2016, some churches have been reluctant to allow congregants to carry their weapons during service, even concealed. The churches are fearful of the tension the presence of a gun might cause or the message it might send in an environment that is supposed to be welcoming to outsiders. Even now, some churches around the state say they believe they should rely on their faith in God to protect them from potential attacks, not guns.

“There is a fundamental question about who is the church and what are we about. Are we going to be gun-carrying and put trust in redemptive violence?” Kyle Childress, the pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, told the Austin American-Statesman in December. “I don’t believe the way of Jesus Christ teaches that.”

Before the Sutherland Springs shooting, several major church groups in Texas, including leaders of the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, had advised their membership to ban weapons from services. Citing the Catholic doctrine that the real presence of Jesus Christ exists inside the sanctuary, dioceses in major cities, including Dallas, San Antonio and Houston, banned guns. But in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs, church leaders of various denominations have faced pressure to reconsider their positions on weapons.

In November, just a day after the shooting in South Texas, the Diocese of Dallas said it would not formally lift its ban on the open or concealed carry of firearms inside its churches, but it advised its parishes to consider removing outdoor signs that advertised the prohibition on guns out of fear it would make the churches more vulnerable to attack. But the move effectively allowed the carry of weapons, since state law requires any business banning guns to install a public sign formally stating that policy.

Outside of Texas, the Sutherland Springs attack sparked new calls for gun control measures — the same response that happened just weeks earlier after the Oct. 1 mass shooting in Las Vegas and other deadly events before that. But in the Lone Star state, the opposite happened, especially in the small towns around Sutherland Springs. Worried residents increasingly saw firearms as their only reliable line of protection in an area where law enforcement isn’t always around the corner.

Gun stores in Wilson County, where Sutherland Springs is located, have reported an uptick in the sale of firearms and applications for concealed weapons since November, including from local pastors looking to protect their flock. It’s not unheard of for a pastor to carry a gun in the pulpit. Frank Pomeroy, the head pastor at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, told reporters after the shooting that he regularly carried his weapon to church. But on that Sunday morning when his church was attacked, Pomeroy was in Oklahoma City taking a class to be a licensed gun instructor for a youth class on pistols. His daughter Annabelle, just 14, was killed in the shooting. The pastor has admitted to agonizing over whether he could have stopped the attack.

“In a way, I think that if I were there I could have done more,” Pomeroy told the New York Times after the shooting. “But who is to say?”

Church leaders in the heavily rural area had operated on a mostly “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to carrying firearms during services even before the Nov. 3 shooting and now say they have noticed more guns on Sunday mornings. “I honestly welcome it,” said a pastor from Floresville, Texas, a  town neighboring Sutherland Springs. The pastor declined to be identified by name because he did not want his church to be a target. “People are nervous, but they aren’t afraid of guns around here,” he said. “They are afraid of someone barging in and shooting them.”

In Sutherland Springs, Devin Kelley, the gunman, was ultimately stopped when he left the church and came under fire from Stephen Willeford, a church neighbor who had grabbed his own weapon when he heard gunfire across the street. Although he was wearing ballistic armor, Kelley was shot twice, in the leg and torso, causing him to drop his gun — an AR-556 assault rifle — and flee. He later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after Willeford and another man, Johnnie Langendorff, pursued him in a high-speed chase into the countryside.

Police have speculated that Willeford may have stopped Kelley from killing more people. The gunman was believed to have targeted the church in a dispute with his estranged wife’s mother, but she wasn’t in church that morning. Inside Kelley’s vehicle, police found two more guns and additional ammunition. Investigators have hinted he may have had more targets, although they have offered no other details.

In the aftermath of the shooting, some churchgoers in the region appointed themselves to be unofficial guardians of their church, taking inspiration from Willeford’s gun battle with Kelley. At the same time, some churches, especially smaller congregations in rural areas, have sought to set up security teams made up of volunteers — something they couldn’t legally do until recently.

In September, just two months before the Sutherland Springs attack, a new state law went into effect that allowed churches to form security teams without having the training, licensing, insurance and background checks usually required of security guards in the state. Before that, churches who were caught relying on armed volunteers that did not meet state licensing requirement faced fines up to $10,000 and potential jail time — though there’s no record of any organization being charged. Backers of the new law, including Meeks, argued that the old regulations unfairly penalized small churches that couldn’t afford  to hire outside security or formally license members of the congregation, leaving them vulnerable.

But opponents of the law have raised concern about the potential danger caused by untrained volunteers who don’t know how to properly use their weapons or identify and respond to a potential threat in the heat of the moment. They say it’s no different from having an unlicensed vigilante sitting in the church pew and have expressed concern about accidents — which have happened in recent weeks.

Just days after the shooting in Sutherland Springs, a 81-year-old man was accidentally shot in the hand and his wife was grazed in the stomach at a church in Tellico Plains, Tenn., after he pulled out his weapon during a church discussion on bringing firearms to church.

That unease over potential accidents and guns in the hands of untrained congregants has only increased in the rush to protect churches in the aftermath of Sutherland Springs.

“Having Bubba there with a gun is not necessarily the best idea,” said Chuck Chadwick, a longtime church security expert and founder of the National Organization of Church Security and Safety Management. He has been training churches on how to protect themselves for more than a decade through Gatekeepers Security Services, a Dallas-area private security firm he and his family operate.

The program, which costs $800, has trained and certified more than 350 parishioners, church staffers and even pastors as state-licensed personal protection officers. It’s based on a curriculum that closely mirrors requirements for private security officers, including training in handguns and hand-to-hand combat. Participants are trained in church-specific scenarios, such as distinguishing potential troublemakers from those who may be showing signs of emotional distress and are seeking help.

“Churches have a unique dilemma because nobody wants to shut the doors to people who need help,” Chadwick said. “But you also have to have people who can detect the difference between whether someone is going up for prayer or whether they are going up to attack the pastor. You don’t always know, and you have to be prepared to act. … That comes from training.”

On a recent weekend, the Gatekeepers class in a suburb outside Dallas included six men from a small church in San Marcos, Texas, a town about 45 minutes north of Sutherland Springs. The group, which included the pastor, had signed up for training after the Nov. 5 shooting.

All the men were gun owners, skilled marksmen who regularly hunted and spent time at the range. But in training the week before, the group had spent time practicing their skills in a simulator designed to give them an idea of what handling a gun might be like in an active-shooter situation. The experience had been overwhelming. “You imagine it’s going to be stressful and chaotic, but it’s so much more intense than you imagine,” one of the men said. “Hopefully, we never experience anything like that in person.”

That morning, the men were going over potential defense tactics in what would be their final hours of training before testing. They practiced punches and kicks on a rubber dummy at the center of the room, moves designed to neutralize a potential assailant without having to use a gun. The training emphasizes that using a gun in the sanctuary should always be the last resort.

Chadwick’s son, William, a licensed bodyguard who runs security for a prominent Dallas pastor, had spent part of the class standing at a dry-erase board, scratching x’s and o’s on the board like a football coach trying to lay out the best possible plays. A circle represented the church sanctuary, and inside the circle were even-smaller circles — barrier rings that led to the pulpit in the center. He talked about setting up cameras and where to position security and staff, and walked the men through how to de-escalate potentially bad situations.

“Where’s your first line of defense?” he asked. He drew an arrow just outside the circle. “You always need someone here, keeping on eye on the parking lot.”

It was the parking lot outside the church in Sutherland Springs where Kelley had first attracted notice. The gunman had barely parked his SUV, leaving it in the street, when, according to witnesses at a gas station across the street, he jumped out and began firing at the exterior walls of the church before he headed inside the sanctuary.

William Chadwick, a serious but affable man, grows angry just thinking about it. Along with his dad, who was running church security when he was just a kid, he had spent most of his adult life trying to spread the word to churches to be more mindful of potential threats. What happened in Sutherland Springs just seemed senseless to him and preventable.

“There was no one there to confront him, no one there to stop him,” he said. “I remember people were saying how heartbroken they were, and I was, too. But I was so furious. I was actually angry. There was not a single person there, no gatekeeper, no one to stand in that threshold and tell him no. … When are people going to get serious?”

In Santa Anna, Meeks’s presentation was far more informal. The retired police officer outlined some of the same suggestions emphasized in the Gatekeeper training, including locking certain doors and where to position church staff.

“Get in the parking lot. They are all coming from the parking lot. Nobody’s coming on an airplane. They’re going to pull up in the car in the parking lot, get out and start,” Meeks said. “If you are there to deal with them, there’s a good chance they won’t get inside. You cannot let the shootout take place in the sanctuary, are you hearing me?”

Meeks repeatedly advised the congregants to study mental illness, accusing churches of dancing around a subject that is a more realistic threat than an ISIS-inspired soldier storming the sanctuary. “You need to know what schizophrenia is. You need to know what bipolar means. You need to understand aggression. You got people in your church that got all these diseases,” the former cop said. “Study these things. Why is the church so scared of everything? You ought to be on the phone next week and get somebody out here from mental health services and say, ‘Educate us.’ … Can I get an amen on that?”

“Amen!” a man shouted.

Meeks was blunt that his seminar did not teach the congregants everything they needed to know. “You ain’t ready,” he said. He advised them to enroll in a class like Gatekeepers, if they could afford it. But he acknowledged that many small churches simply didn’t have the money. So he repeatedly advised them to go back to their churches and train and practice security scenarios repeatedly.

“If your church safety team is not trained, I don’t even know that you should have one. You’re nothing but a liability to the whole church,” Meeks said. “Because when he shows up to kill, it is going to be sheer chaos and hell like you never dreamed possible. You better start training, you better be practicing.”

Before he ended the service, Meeks took up a collection, asking for donations to buy a new bulletproof vest for a local police officer who sat in the back. He had recognized instantly that the one the cop was wearing was so old it could barely withstand a conventional gunshot, much less fire from the kind of military-style assault rifles used in recent mass shootings. Then Meeks sent his audience off with a prayer — though he kept his eyes open and his head up, one of the tips he had offered his audience.

“Never EVER close your eyes,” he said.

_____

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MAQUOKETA, Iowa—The scuffle broke out around the same time Donald Trump began his ceremonial walk through the U.S. House chamber to deliver his first State of the Union address as president. Two girls jockeying for possession of the ball before the halftime buzzer had collided and fallen to the ground in a blur of tangled limbs and thrashing pony tails before the ref blew a whistle and signaled a pair of free throws for the hometown Maquoketa Cardinals.

In the stands, there were whoops and fist bumps from the crowd of 200 or so, a pretty good turnout for girls basketball on frigid Tuesday night here deep in the heart of Iowa’s rural Mississippi River Valley, roughly 888 miles away from the nation’s capital. The Cardinals girls varsity team was struggling to keep pace with their visiting rivals, the Mount Vernon Mustangs, in hopes of turning around a middling season.

As the clock ticked down to halftime, some in the crowd jumped to their feet, yelling encouragement to the girls on the court. There were students and parents and others with a personal connection to the game. But many in the stands were there just to be there—locals more interested in cheering on the hometown team than watching Trump’s State of the Union address.

“You ask me what I would rather be doing, watching Trump or sitting here, and this is where I would say every time,” said Jack Marlowe, a 81-year-old retired sports writer for the local paper who spent nearly 40 years chronicling high school sports here in Jackson County.

Seated in the stands right behind the basket, he cheered as a Cardinals player sunk in two points. “It’s not just the game, though I love it, and I love these kids,” Marlowe said. “But why would I watch? What in that speech will change anything?”

Entering the game with a record of 10 wins and 9 losses, the Cardinals seemed out of the race for the conference league championship. But in the team’s plight to finish well, to keep pace with their rivals, some here saw something emblematic of the larger problems faced by this small town, which like the team, has fought to stay in the game.

Here in Jackson County, residents have watched their factories close and job prospects fade. Though the local unemployment rate is roughly 4 percent, slightly higher than the state total but lower than the national average, that number doesn’t account for those who have simply given up looking for work, as many here are well aware. The per capita income–$25,865 in 2017—was below both the state and national averages. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 13 percent of the population was living below poverty level, also higher than average.

When Donald Trump spoke of running to represent the “forgotten people” and “forgotten towns” of the country during his bid for the presidency, the message resonated with people here and throughout rural Iowa. In a sweep not seen in any other state in the country, Trump flipped 31 counties in Iowa in 2016 on the way to his 10-point victory here over Hillary Clinton. More than a dozen of those counties were strongly blue before Trump came along—including Jackson County, where Barack Obama won by 17 points in 2012. But in a victory that was echoed in rural counties all over the Mississippi Valley, extending up from Iowa into bordering Minnesota and Wisconsin, Trump reversed the trend, winning Jackson County by 19 points.

But a year into the Trump presidency, many here question whether the real estate mogul will deliver the jobs and economic progress he promised to small town America. Though some in Jackson County still wave the Trump flag—including one resident who has literally erected a Trump flag on property along state highway 64, one of the main roads into town—some voters who backed the real estate mogul in his unlikely path to the presidency seemed disappointed by his first year in office.

Speaking during the first quarter of the game, Janie, a registered Democrat who backed Trump (she declined to give her last name) said she had believed the former reality television star was the “lesser of two evils” compared to Clinton, whom she saw as a politician who was “more of the same.” But she said she has been disappointed by the “endless chaos” of the Trump presidency and his inability to cut through Washington’s gridlock. “Not all of that is his fault,” she said. “But I hoped he would be about to do something.”

Many here declined to talk about Trump—including one woman who sighed and replied, “What did he do now?” Some said they saw the game as a place of retreat from the political turmoil. “I see it on television, hear it on the radio,” one man said. “You just can’t escape, though I try very hard to.”

Jerry Ferrell, a retired farmer, described himself as the Cardinals’ number one fan who would never miss a home game. But he also admitted he had no desire to watch Trump’s speech in full and would rather catch the highlights after the game. “I watch and listen to him, and I just feel worried,” he said. It wasn’t the lack of job creation or his failure to deliver on promises to small towns like this. He expressed concern about Trump’s aggressive rhetoric towards other countries and the risk of war, after decades of being caught up in overseas conflicts including in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It really worries me, the potential of loss of life,” he said.

By the fourth quarter, the Cardinals were down significantly, hurt by their own offensive missteps and an aggressive Mustang defense. But the clock wound down, the silence of the crowd on the home team side was suddenly interrupted by the sound of Trump’s voice. Cathy Pickup, whose 16-year-old daughter Carolyn was on the court, had pulled up the speech on her phone. Shushed by another basketball fan, she stood and took her phone to the far end of the gym, holding the phone’s speaker up to her ear with one hand while she cheered on her daughter with the other.

“I couldn’t control myself,” Pickup admitted.

A self-described “hardcore Democrat,” Pickup said Trump’s rhetoric and behavior is hard to ignore, no matter how much she tries. “In all honesty, I wanted to see if he was going to mess up and what he was going to say,” she said. “You can’t look away. …When he goes off the cuff, it’s a trainwreck, and it scares me, for my family and for my country. The fights he picks… You never know what he’s going to say or who he’s going to say it to and what the consequences are going to be.”

At the final buzzer, the Cardinals lost, 54 to 40. The players on both sides shook hands and gave high fives. In the stands, spectators stood and applauded. As he walked out the door into the high school lobby, past the glass cases of trophies from championship years past, toward the frigid Iowa night, Marlowe smiled.

“People say it’s just a game, but the truth is, Trump could probably learn a few things from these girls about team work and working together,” he said. “Congress, too.”

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