
A note from yesterday. We walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was a walk across a bridge – until today. Today, as I looked back on it, it suddenly hit me that I walked in the footsteps, not just of ML King, and other known leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, but I walked in footsteps of people like me, the ordinary person who just wanted to be counted, acknowledged and seen to have value. I don’t think of myself as not having value, but this was different. In the few days of this Pilgrimage, I’ve begun to look at the people who marched in 1965, not as people larger than life, but simply as people who celebrated the lives they were given, in an important act of civil disobedience. I walked in their steps! I am elated. I am humbled.
Today started in Marion Alabama. We met at Zion United Methodist Church. We met 4 women who grew up in Marion. Two of them were children in 1965. They told us about Marion now, with not much to keep the young folk from moving away, and they talked about how not much has changed. They talked about the importance of the church as the place that brought them together, gave them a place of community and provided the place to learn and plan and prepare.
Two of the women moved away, but came back to retire. One of the women had never been away, and related how she went for months, every time the voter registration office was open, to register to vote. She eventually did pass, and when there was a vacancy in the Voter Registrar’s office, she decided to run for it, and won. She said in succeeding elections, even though Marion had more Black residents than white, Black candidates never seemed to win. One day she noticed that some of the forms had a small ‘c’ at the top of the page and later learned the ‘Colored’ ballots simply were not counted. She is still with the Voter Registration Commission and has held the position over 25 years.
We went to the grave site of Jimmy Lee Jackson, whose death was the impetus for the March, from Selma to Montgomery. On February 17, 1965, there was a mass meeting for voting rights at the Zion Methodist Church, followed by a March toward the jail (a scant block away). The March was met with extreme law enforcement violence and Jimmy Lee was shot by a state trooper as he was trying to protect his mother and 80 year-old grandfather from the violence. He died in Selma, 9 days later.
The March, from Selma to Montgomery was planned, initially to take Jimmy Lee’s body to the Governor, to protest Voting Suppression and the treatment of the troopers. Selma was chosen as the beginning point, because it was much more direct than going from Marion. Even so, the March took 5 days to complete and along the way, marchers stayed in ‘Tent Cities’, on lands belonging to Black farmers.
What I can’t seem to wrap my head around is the fact this all happened in 1965! Not only was it not that long ago, but it’s still happening, and it’s so hard to do much about it. In Selma, now when 80% of the population is Black, with a Black mayor, the town leaders (read white, moneyed town leaders) erected a memorial after 1965, to a Confederate General Forrest, who had no relationship to Selma, but was responsible for many Confederate victories. The Black folk had to go to court to have the memorial moved from it’s initial location downtown, to the Live Oak Cemetery, where in the center of the cemetery there is a ring of land that was deeded to the confederacy, pre-statehood. The center, or circle of that cemetery is cared for by the Daughters of the Confederacy. The victory of voting rights, and the changing laws of Civil Rights, were badly accepted, and in response, the whites rubbed the Blacks noses in their victory as if to say, “You might have won some concessions, but we are still here; we aren’t going anywhere, we are still superior and will always be”. The attitude still exists and has been re-ignited in the current political climate.
On the drive from Marion to Meridian MS, we watched a documentary about 1964’s Freedom Summer. Three CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) Civil Rights workers, were trained and sent to Mississippi, went missing and were later found murdered. James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were arrested, released, grabbed by the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and presumed murdered. They were found 44 days after they went missing, after parts of the Mississippi River were drug, finding 9 bodies that turned out to not be the missing Civil Rights workers. I think I remember reading that one of the men was found to have been buried alive. 40 years later, one Klan member was brought to trial, convicted and given a sentence of 20 years for each man’s death.
We stopped at the grave site of James Chaney. We heard about the kind of man he was. He and his companions were in their early 20’s. He had a daughter born just days before he left Ohio for Mississippi. He had participated in the training for Schwerner, Goodman and others. As we stood at his grave, pondering his life and the documentary we had just watched, a car drove up and the driver was Chaney’s daughter.
Angela Chaney Lewis did not know her father. Shortly after his body was found, she and her mother disappeared and she was raised far away from the public eye. As an adult, she was reunited with her grandmother. At the age of 40, she realized she was very angry with him, and needed to learn about the man he was. She spoke of her life, and for her refusal to be bitter for what had happened, for choosing to fill herself and her life with love, and for not allowing bitterness, anger and hatred to consume her. She refuses to become enraged and hateful, like those who killed her father. She is still in communication with the families of Schwerner and Goodman, and spoke lovingly of her grandmother, her father’s mother, who died a few years ago and is buried next to her son.
Angela’s attitude is one we’ve seen, over and over. We saw it in Charleston, after a shooter participated in bible study at Immanuel Church. More recently, we saw it in Texas, after the female officer found guilty of a shooting, was embraced and forgiven by a relative. There is a graciousness, a willingness to forgive, to not harbor hatred and resentment when so many backs have been broken by hatred, mistreatment and the many, many ways Blacks have been disrespected, disenfranchised, disapproved of, and any other “dis” you can think of. There is a resilience, a willingness to forgive, a tremendous capacity to want to love and live and be in harmony with everyone else.
It just occurred to me, do you suppose we Black people are, over the centuries, being groomed to be God’s best examples of unconditional love? Forgive me for wanting to feel a little bit superior!
Laura
Today started in Marion Alabama. We met at Zion United Methodist Church. We met 4 women who grew up in Marion. Two of them were children in 1965. They told us about Marion now, with not much to keep the young folk from moving away, and they talked about how not much has changed. They talked about the importance of the church as the place that brought them together, gave them a place of community and provided the place to learn and plan and prepare.
Two of the women moved away, but came back to retire. One of the women had never been away, and related how she went for months, every time the voter registration office was open, to register to vote. She eventually did pass, and when there was a vacancy in the Voter Registrar’s office, she decided to run for it, and won. She said in succeeding elections, even though Marion had more Black residents than white, Black candidates never seemed to win. One day she noticed that some of the forms had a small ‘c’ at the top of the page and later learned the ‘Colored’ ballots simply were not counted. She is still with the Voter Registration Commission and has held the position over 25 years.
We went to the grave site of Jimmy Lee Jackson, whose death was the impetus for the March, from Selma to Montgomery. On February 17, 1965, there was a mass meeting for voting rights at the Zion Methodist Church, followed by a March toward the jail (a scant block away). The March was met with extreme law enforcement violence and Jimmy Lee was shot by a state trooper as he was trying to protect his mother and 80 year-old grandfather from the violence. He died in Selma, 9 days later.
The March, from Selma to Montgomery was planned, initially to take Jimmy Lee’s body to the Governor, to protest Voting Suppression and the treatment of the troopers. Selma was chosen as the beginning point, because it was much more direct than going from Marion. Even so, the March took 5 days to complete and along the way, marchers stayed in ‘Tent Cities’, on lands belonging to Black farmers.
What I can’t seem to wrap my head around is the fact this all happened in 1965! Not only was it not that long ago, but it’s still happening, and it’s so hard to do much about it. In Selma, now when 80% of the population is Black, with a Black mayor, the town leaders (read white, moneyed town leaders) erected a memorial after 1965, to a Confederate General Forrest, who had no relationship to Selma, but was responsible for many Confederate victories. The Black folk had to go to court to have the memorial moved from it’s initial location downtown, to the Live Oak Cemetery, where in the center of the cemetery there is a ring of land that was deeded to the confederacy, pre-statehood. The center, or circle of that cemetery is cared for by the Daughters of the Confederacy. The victory of voting rights, and the changing laws of Civil Rights, were badly accepted, and in response, the whites rubbed the Blacks noses in their victory as if to say, “You might have won some concessions, but we are still here; we aren’t going anywhere, we are still superior and will always be”. The attitude still exists and has been re-ignited in the current political climate.
On the drive from Marion to Meridian MS, we watched a documentary about 1964’s Freedom Summer. Three CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) Civil Rights workers, were trained and sent to Mississippi, went missing and were later found murdered. James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were arrested, released, grabbed by the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and presumed murdered. They were found 44 days after they went missing, after parts of the Mississippi River were drug, finding 9 bodies that turned out to not be the missing Civil Rights workers. I think I remember reading that one of the men was found to have been buried alive. 40 years later, one Klan member was brought to trial, convicted and given a sentence of 20 years for each man’s death.
We stopped at the grave site of James Chaney. We heard about the kind of man he was. He and his companions were in their early 20’s. He had a daughter born just days before he left Ohio for Mississippi. He had participated in the training for Schwerner, Goodman and others. As we stood at his grave, pondering his life and the documentary we had just watched, a car drove up and the driver was Chaney’s daughter.
Angela Chaney Lewis did not know her father. Shortly after his body was found, she and her mother disappeared and she was raised far away from the public eye. As an adult, she was reunited with her grandmother. At the age of 40, she realized she was very angry with him, and needed to learn about the man he was. She spoke of her life, and for her refusal to be bitter for what had happened, for choosing to fill herself and her life with love, and for not allowing bitterness, anger and hatred to consume her. She refuses to become enraged and hateful, like those who killed her father. She is still in communication with the families of Schwerner and Goodman, and spoke lovingly of her grandmother, her father’s mother, who died a few years ago and is buried next to her son.
Angela’s attitude is one we’ve seen, over and over. We saw it in Charleston, after a shooter participated in bible study at Immanuel Church. More recently, we saw it in Texas, after the female officer found guilty of a shooting, was embraced and forgiven by a relative. There is a graciousness, a willingness to forgive, to not harbor hatred and resentment when so many backs have been broken by hatred, mistreatment and the many, many ways Blacks have been disrespected, disenfranchised, disapproved of, and any other “dis” you can think of. There is a resilience, a willingness to forgive, a tremendous capacity to want to love and live and be in harmony with everyone else.
It just occurred to me, do you suppose we Black people are, over the centuries, being groomed to be God’s best examples of unconditional love? Forgive me for wanting to feel a little bit superior!
Laura