Lessons from Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma

Mennonite Central Committee
Saturday, 8 April 2000

SELMA, Alabama -- It has been 35 years since the fateful march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Yet the memories and energy of this critical event seem strongly present as if it had happened yesterday.

Recently, I accompanied congressional representatives to the cities of Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, on a civil rights learning tour.

The civil rights movement is far from over. Its strivings, as wide as the spaces and roads between these cities, is as fresh as the vitality of the churches we visited. Its goals for people of the South, for people of color and for the nation still have great significance. I found along with others, lessons still to be learned.

As a person of faith, I left this trip encouraged to work harder for peace and justice – especially across lines of color. A peculiar pain and dignity lies behind the civil rights struggle. At first though daunting, engaging it brings true joy.

Most see the civil rights movement as a collection of personalities, stories and events. Yet civil rights achievements are not personal successes or gains for one particular group. As Anabaptist and Christian people, we place a particularly high value on listening to people's stories; and even being co-participants, knowing God is at work in history, our lives and our world.

While in Alabama, I was looking for God's love and action even in the midst of the violence and adversity that met the civil rights movement. I was reminded of a simple profound truth that without the support of people and churches even the movements most notable leaders, like the Revs. Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would not be able to achieve progress. Speaking to the delegation, Juanita Abernathy and Coretta Scott King recounted how the hospitality and support of churches was essential to the work.

Individual courage within the civil rights movement was extraordinary, reinforced by members who stayed together as a community, and maintained by a common sense of history and a belief in the value of human dignity, freedom and hope in God.

When one examines the movement's history, what occurred was a social struggle conducted by youth and children. It was Emmett Till; four little girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; and a young John Lewis, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), beaten during non-violent protests. It was children who faced police dogs and fire hoses.

It was Kelly Ingram Park's "Freedom Walk" in Birmingham attest to this. There, one cannot help but be moved walking through the blue steel sculpture of threatening dogs. I shivered, as anyone would, imagining what is was like to face that danger.

Birmingham's Civil Rights Institute documents a history of the disparities, discrimination, and detriments that black children endured. Historians Rev. Will Campbell and David Halberstam testified that worried parents could not stop children from participating in the civil rights movement.

History points to schools, buses, water fountains, public facilities and a way of life all markedly different due to segregation. Churches in Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma, some once misshaped by attack, now house photographs and recollections for all to remember and reflect. Church elders still tell stories of the movement's struggle. Those who remember explain where their story, our story, fits into the larger struggle for human rights.

South African Ambassador Sheila Sisulu, who accompanied the delegation, spoke of parallels in her country: the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and the tragedies of Sharpville and Soweto.

In 1965, barely 1 percent of blacks were registered to vote in Selma. Some 600 people met with terrible state-sanctioned violence on a "Bloody Sunday" in March. A nation was horrified, and voting rights laws were passed. President Clinton noted, "It has been said that the Voting Rights Act was signed in ink in Washington, but it first was signed in blood in Selma."

Named and unnamed heroes have helped us cross many bridges beside the Pettus Bridge and walk that path toward our democracy and freedom.

The President added, "Thirty-five years ago, a single day in Selma became a seminal moment in the history of our country. On this bridge, America's long march to freedom met a roadblock of violent resistance. But the marchers, thank God, would not take a detour on the road to freedom." That road still lies ahead of us.

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