Oh Freedom: 40th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday

"Oh Freedom! Oh Freedom! Oh Freedom over me! And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free!"

Those are the words to a freedom song (also a Negro spiritual) that members of the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other activists used to sing during civil rights marches and rallies. I never thought I would have the opportunity to sing those words along with the SNCC Singers, but there I was, standing in front of Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, singing and swaying with the original SNCC Singers, proclaiming my dedication to freedom. I could have died right there and had nary a complaint about the course of my life. However, if I had died then, I would have missed the chance, a few minutes later, to stand less than one foot away from Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King III as they passed through the crowd to address the rally. I would have missed being led in a call-and-response by Rev. Jesse Jackson. I would not have had the opportunity to tremble from excitement when Rev. Joseph Lowery put his arm around me to take a picture. And I would have protested being absent from the spot where Maxine Waters, Congresswoman from Los Angeles, California, publicly castigated Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other conservative members of Congress for coming to Selma for a photo opportunity but voting against the interests of the poor and marginalized in Washington. It was glorious, y'all.

Shannon and I were in Selma, AL on March 6, 2005 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, so called because of the brutality unleashed upon 500 nonviolent marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on their way to Montgomery. Civil rights luminaries turned out in force. In addition to the people I mentioned above, Rev. C.T. Vivian of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), Harry Belafonte (entertainer), Andrew Young (SCLC, former mayor of Atlanta), Diane Nash (SNCC), Charles Jones (SNCC), Ted Shaw, the Executive Director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Chuck D. of Public Enemy, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, Congressman John Lewis, Rev. James Bevel (SCLC), Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (SCLC), the original SNCC Singers, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Rev. Al Sharpton were all in attendance. They reflected the light from other civil rights veterans whose names we don't know but whose participation in the movement brought the country closer to its ideals. I met one such man, his name is Warren Harrison. He marched in Selma and was a resident of Resurrection City in Washington, D.C. as part of the Poor People's Campaign. Harrison is now a long-distance bus driver who lives in Michigan. Harrison is a hero, but he is also an inspiration and a reminder that a hero is just an ordinary person who takes a principled stand.

The original march from Selma to Montgomery was conceived by civil rights leaders after a 26 year-old black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, was killed by police officers when he was trying to protect his mother after a voting rights demonstration in nearby Marion, Alabama. When Jimmie arrived at the hospital he was still alive, but the hospital staff claimed to be out of blood and unable to give Jimmie a necessary transfusion. He died there. Martin Luther King and other leaders reasoned that a long march over the course of several days (90 miles) would give the people an outlet and a focal point for angry, frustrated emotions and would provide needed cooling off time to work through negative feelings engendered by the violence in Marion.

To get from Selma to Montgomery, the marchers would have to take Highway 80, the main thoroughfare in Selma. The Alabama River separates the town of Selma from the highway like a swift wide moat. A large, high arc of a bridge, called the Edmond Pettus Bridge, spans the river to allow passage for foot and automobile traffic. The arc of the bridge is particularly important because when a person is on one side of the bridge it is impossible to see over to the other side. When the marchers set out from Brown Chapel and First Baptist Church toward the foot of the bridge, they could not have known what was waiting for them on the other side. As they topped the crest of the bridge the solid blue line of mounted state troopers came into view. They continued marching and as they did, the troopers released tear gas and their billy clubs. They beat and kicked marchers who had tripped and fallen, or who had given in to the gas. One woman, Amelia Boynton Robinson, was beaten and left for dead. John Lewis, SNCC leader and now Congressman from Atlanta, Georgia, was beaten unconscious and also left for dead. News coverage of the violence was on televisions all over America that night.

The next day, King sent out a telegram inviting concerned Americans from all over the nation to come to Selma. Two of the people who came, Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister and Viola Liuzzo, a white Unitarian church member, wife, and mother of five from Detroit, were killed there. Rev. Reeb was attacked with a pipe by a group of white youths on the streets of Selma in broad daylight on March 9; he died of his injuries on March 11. On March 24, the night 25,000 marchers triumphantly entered Montgomery, Liuzzo was shot at point-blank range in her car by Klan members as she drove a fellow civil rights worker home along Highway 80 East. Covered in Liuzzo's blood, the passenger, Leroy Moton, played dead and survived the attack.

I often think of the Selma to Montgomery marches whenever discouragement over the state of civil or human rights sits heavily on my shoulders. And I remember that on their first attempt, the marchers were beaten and turned back. On their second attempt, because they were opposed by an injunction from the federal court, the only ally civil rights workers had, the marchers set out to the bridge, faced the state troopers, kneeled, prayed and turned around. At that point, their spirits must have been bordering on broken. But the federal injunction was finally cleared and on their third attempt, 3000 marchers walked right across that bridge, escorted and protected by their former tormentors. When they finished marching, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law quoting the words of a Negro spiritual, "We shall overcome."

As I sit, young, gifted and black (YG&B), up to my neck in rights and awash in opportunities, "thank you" feels like too paltry a term to express my gratitude for the courage and determination of those who came before. Therefore I will end this tribute with another song, the second verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing", the Negro National Anthem:

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

I know we will get to Montgomery. Thank you for believing.