Journey to the Past
Reed Galin, United Methodist News Service
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
SELMA, ALA. — For days, it rained on Selma.
A foreboding, punishing kind of rain swelled the Alabama River, turning it viscous with runoff silt.
But finally, a brilliant late afternoon sun scrubbed the sky clear and cast a sharp image of the old Edmund Pettus Bridge across the milk-chocolate water. Below the massive arched shadow of the bridge superstructure, small figures were moving across the bridge.
They were students affiliated with the United Methodist campus ministry at Emporia State University and Baker University, spending spring break tracing the Civil Rights struggle of the ’50s and ’60s. From Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. first became a public figure, to Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., where forced desegregation began and at various landmarks along the way, the students were engrossed by countless stories of heroism and horror.
They saw where four girls were killed by a bomb at the 16th Avenue Church in Birmingham, Ala. In Montgomery, Ala., they visited King’s home and his Dexter Avenue Church, headquarters of the Montgomery bus boycott that sparked the civil rights movement after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat.
At the Civil Rights Memorial, students confronted the fact that many victims of those years were their own age.
Baker University student Chevon Brown learned about 19-year-old Michael McDonald, kidnapped by Klansmen in Mobile, Ala., executed, and left hanging from a tree. Her eyes moistened as she tried to find a context for so much violence and hatred.
“It’s not fair!” she almost wailed. “To see what ordinary people went through. We hear about Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King but, I mean, this is the first I’ve ever heard about Michael McDonald. To see that people gave their lives for us to just take things for granted, it’s not fair, we owe them more than that.”
It was hardly a relaxing spring vacation.
By the time they got to Selma, the group had already traveled 1,500 miles from Kansas, across the south, and back. ESU campus minister and tour guide Kurt Cooper organized the trip as a means of exploring how a person’s spirituality can relate to justice and commitment in the real world. They traveled in a borrowed church van. At a highway pit stop, Cooper refueled the vehicle, munched one of many peanut butter sandwiches and explained how the itinerary was planned.
“It gives them a sense of the scope of territory that freedom riders covered, and they’re also traveling some of the same roads and hearing their stories,” Cooper said. Students who’ve chosen to make this tour with him on previous spring breaks have changed their ideas about moral courage by the time they got back to Kansas.
“There’s something about standing on a corner in Selma Alabama and walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge that’s different from reading about it in a book,” he said. “You know, pilgrimage is common to Christian experience in some ways, this is just taking that idea and putting it in a different context.”
The Pettus bridge — named for a Confederate Civil War general — is one of the most potent monuments of the struggle and the students stopped there to walk in the steps of civil rights foot soldiers.
In March 1965, demonstrators set out from Selma to Montgomery to march for voting rights. But they had only reached the far side of the bridge when they were set upon by Alabama State troopers and local deputies on horseback. It is a dark corner of American history known as “Bloody Sunday,” and the resulting images shown around the world became a tipping point and convinced The U.S. government that legally protected segregation could no longer be tolerated. It provoked a flood of civil rights activists to go to the South and built critical momentum for change.
In the Voting Rights Museum at the foot of the bridge, guide Sam Walker succinctly summed up the significance of Bloody Sunday and the march to Montgomery, which was later resumed with the protection of National Guard troops:
“That march led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act, which was signed on Aug. 6, 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, which led to the election of President Barack Obama on Nov. 4, 2008.”
For the students, a light went on — it shaped their world.
Like many of the people they met on the way, Walker had lived the struggle. Eleven years old in 1965, he took his place in the picket lines. He told the visitors he was twice arrested and stuffed in a 12-foot cell with 30 other people.
“When they came to punish protesters they didn’t say ‘You’re 11, you can go back home and have your lunch,’” Walker said. “They made things miserable to try break your spirit.”
Emporia State student David Hopkins sat in the museum replica of that jail cell and considered the inhumanity — as he described it — that he’d been wading in for a week. Imagining what it would be like to be crammed in the cage for two days with dozens of other frightened and perhaps injured people, he laughed at the thought that he could have spent the break at the beach, instead.
“Yeah, that’s fun,” he said, “but it only lasts while you’re there. The impact of what we have here is for a lifetime.”
After Selma, the group went on to The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where King was assassinated in 1968. With long distances between landmarks, said Emporia State student Ashley Lee, the students had time for conversations in the van about contemporary parallels to what they were learning about the past. They talked about issues of the spirit and societal prejudice, the treatment of gays and lesbians in America, immigrant backlash and genocide in other parts of the world.
“I definitely will not look at things the same after this,” she said.
It was not just history any more.
“They’re getting something that says my faith isn’t just practiced on Sunday mornings, that my spiritual life is something that I take out into the world,” Cooper said with quiet intensity. “To know you can plant seeds in people’s lives about justice and truth and righteousness is a really powerful thing.”