By the Rev. Dawn Cooley
Today is day 7 of the UU Living Legacy Pilgrimage. And today, I am thinking about the women of the civil rights movement, and the various roles women played.

I would guess that Rosa Parks is the first woman most people think of when they think of women in the civil rights movement. Her courageous seated protest on the Montgomery bus inspired much that came after.  More...

By the Rev. Dawn Cooley

Today was day 6 of the UU Living Legacy Civil Rights Pilgrimage. And boy, at this point I can barely remember what day it was and which towns we visited. Living out of a suitcase has gotten old. I am a bus-riding expert. I long for my family, my bed, my routine. And I hate all these unsolved (or long delayed) cases of murder or assassination (We visited the Medgar Evers House Museum today…more on that in another post I suspect. I will leave it that he was an amazing man whom most of us should know a lot more about.)  More...

The Rev. Susan Karlson wrote this prose after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge with our group on the Pilgrimage:

"Crossing Over"

I walked the "Bridge" today
over the most beautiful flowing river,
under the most beneficent blue skies.
Together in pairs,
we walked--
silently, prayerfully.
We crossed the bridge,
imagining a different blue sea below--
a sea of blue deputies
with clubs, tear gas,
on horseback--
there to greet the marchers. 

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By the Rev. Dawn Cooley
This morning started with a trip to the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL. This powerful monument, created by Maya Lin (creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC), has the names of 40 people (black and white) who were killed from 1955 to 1968 in the South in civil rights related murders.

While we were there, Morris Dees came and spoke to us about the important work of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the different efforts they are focusing on right now. One that he mentioned was the school-to-prison-pipeline. Remember that, because I will come back to it. More...

By John Blevins
On Monday, Oct 8th, the Pilgrimage group met with several civil rights activists in Marion, Perry County, Alabama. Willie Nell Avery, chief election commissioner in Marion was one of them. She fascinated us with tales from her work. She reported that she had just recently discovered, almost by accident, that “many” voters had been struck from her voter rolls, without announcement. She is now in the process of trying to figure out the full scope of the problem. Fascinatingly, she told us that one company or agency (I think it was ESS, but I need to do more research on this) does all the voter registration processing for the whole country. I find it frightening to think that other registrars may not be as diligent as Ms. Avery. Who knows what may have happened in other jurisdictions. Is this an isolated incident? A new book by investigator Greg Palast, “Billionaires and Ballot Busters” suggests it may not be. I just ordered my copy.

By the Rev. Dawn Cooley
Today, I walked through the parsonage that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his family lived in when he was the minister of Dexter Baptist Church here in Montgomery, AL. The tour guide knew her stuff, and at the end of the tour through the house (which included the table at which the SCLC was formed), we got to the kitchen. She kept the lights off, and told us the story of MLK’s kitchen table epiphany. He had been struggling, and gotten home late. Everyone was asleep. The phone rang and it was someone telling him his house was going to be bombed. He definitely couldn’t sleep after that (who could?) so he went and sat at the kitchen table. And he prayed. And in his prayers, he heard a voice, and it comforted him, and took away all his fears. He knew he was on the right path. More...

By the Rev. Dawn Cooley
At Brown Chapel AME, there are two different places where martyrs to the Civil Rights Movement (or “The Movement”) are honored: four people who died in service to the cause in 1965: Jonathan Daniels, James Reeb, Jimmie Lee Jackson, and Violet Liuzzo. This is the church that was the hub for mass meetings in Selma. It was where all three marches started from (Bloody Sunday, Turnaround Tuesday, and the finally-successful Selma to Montgomery March). I have seen pictures of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Fred Shuttlesworth speaking at the pulpit.

When I walked in, I had an almost overhwleming urge to lay my body out on the floor in front of the communion rail and weep. More...

By the Rev. Dawn Cooley
I wish that I could bring you along on this Living Legacy Civil Rights Pilgrimage, because I could write a sermon or even a book on what we experience each day. Choosing what to write here, in such a limited format, is difficult. Particularly on a day as powerful as today, day 3.

We arrived in Marion, AL this morning, at a small, unassuming church. We walked up and down the street, looking at the historical markers. If you didn’t already know, you would never guess that the idea for the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965 started with this small town of 3500.

And yet it did.  More...