Picture
In March 1965, the Reverend Dana McLean Greeley (third from left), Unitarian Universalist Association President, joined other American religious leaders in civil rights marches in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, Alabama.

The marches, prompted by Martin Luther King, Jr., protested violence against African American and other civil rights activists in Selma.

Days before this photograph was taken, an attack on three Unitarian Universalist ministers in Selma left one of them, James Reeb, dead.

Photo from Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School
 PictureUUA Moderator Jim Key
A Unitarian Universalist Call to 
Return to Selma 2015 
by Jim Key, UUA Moderator
June 29, 2014

Fifty years ago this coming spring, during the weeks leading up to the 1965 Selma voter registration campaign, during the weeks of the campaign, and for the march from Selma to Montgomery, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference appealed to people across the United States to join in the struggle for voting rights.

Unitarian Universalists (UUs) were among those who answered the call. Committed clergy and laypersons headed to Selma and, then, Montgomery to lend their bodies and their voices to the cause. This included members of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Board of Trustees, who recessed their 1965 spring meeting in Boston, and reconvened in Selma.

Now, fifty years later, we UUs have received a call to return to Alabama, to Birmingham and Selma for learning and witness March 5-8, 2015. Your UUA Board will be there. We hope you will join us at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We’ll be there to honor those courageous marchers who braved the horses and tear-gas half a century ago, but more importantly we’ll be there to renew our resolve, strengthen our commitment, and stand in humble solidarity with our partners in the work.

To paraphrase James Baldwin: “If we, the relatively conscious ones who must, like lovers, change the consciousness of others do not fail in our duty now; we may just end the racial nightmare, realize our country, and change the history of the world.” I’ll see you on the Bridge.

>>Join Moderator Key in Selma