After the president’s visit and the festivities surrounding the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, it’s been a banner month in Selma. With national attention focused on Selma, our community showed the world a city coming together and moving past the events of 50 years ago.

Unfortunately, two murders this past weekend has reminded us of the resounding message from that weekend — that there’s still much work to do. After the cameras and crowds cleared, we knew there were still going to be issues we’d have to solve internally as a city, but nobody would’ve guessed the reminder would’ve come so quickly and so tragically.

There are no easy answers in situations such as these. No matter how much law enforcement there is, lawbreakers are always going to exist, but we believe the actions of good, quality people are the backbone of this community.

There are so many groups and organizations making positive changes in Selma and pushing Selma forward, and perhaps the terrible incidents of this weekend will encourage even more people to get involved in those.

Far too many times when crimes happen, nobody saw what happened. We encourage community members to combat that by getting involved in neighborhood watches or creating their own watch programs. To help further, attend city council meetings and make sure when it comes time to vote to get to the polls and push others to do so as well.

We don’t need to let the actions of one night undermine a great year in Selma. It’d be easy to throw up our hands and give up, relenting to the crime issues and other problems we face as a community, but we’ve come too far for that.

We showed the world two weeks ago that we could unite as one Selma in commemoration of the history that defined us 50 years ago, but now we need to stay united and stay determined to fix the problems that plague our city.