The Lasting Lesson of Selma: Stand Proud and Be Counted

Two weeks ago, I picked up the paper and saw a photograph showing four minority students, who reportedly had been demonstrating at Hawthorne and Leuzinger high schools, lying face down on the street. A policeman had his gun pointed at them.

I don’t know the exact circumstances of the photograph, though I thought the gun extreme. But I do agree with the purpose of the 2,000 marchers who were protesting alleged racism against black administrators in their school district. I imagine that if I were a high school student today, instead of a high school teacher, I would be among them.

Twenty-five years ago this Sunday, I was 15 years old, and I was demonstrating in one of the marches that helped give those Los Angeles students some of the rights they have today.

I’d like to tell those students what it was like before high schools were integrated. I’d like to tell them how much better off my generation hoped we would be because we marched.

I was brought up in Montgomery, Ala., during the 1950s and ‘60s. My family lived next door to a big city park we knew never to enter.

We watched white children play on the slides and swings and feed the ducks. We heard their joy in running free, having a childhood. We played ball in the streets, dodging cars.

When I was 9 years old, black leaders insisted that Montgomery’s parks be integrated. The white city council closed the public parks rather than allow black children in them.

Sometimes only a street separated where blacks and whites lived. But there was usually no contact, unless it was white kids throwing rocks at us when we passed by.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy lived in the neighborhood. Throughout those early childhood years, I remember being awakened in the night by booming sounds. Minutes later the phone would ring: “They bombed them again,” the caller would say.

In 1963, when I was 14 years old, my whole family sat in the living room watching on TV as Vivian Malone and James Hood integrated the University of Alabama. We all felt a special sense of pride as they walked past Gov. George Wallace, who stood at the door: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

I walked to my piano lesson that afternoon, my head as erect as Vivian Malone’s had been when she walked past Wallace.

A year later, tests and poll taxes instituted by whites still prevented blacks from voting in Selma. Blacks had had enough.

I had been only 6 years old when Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Now I was 15. I’d seen so much. The family always talked, at breakfast and dinner, about what was happening in the civil rights struggle.

This was my time to act in it.

We followed on TV and by word of mouth as a group of marchers left Selma on March 21 for the 54-mile walk to Montgomery, Alabama’s state capital. We waited to join them.

In black churches in Montgomery, student leaders pleaded with parents to let their children miss school on the Thursday the marchers would arrive. My mother had never let me miss school. We always saw education as a way out. But this protest was important, she felt.

That week, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leaders came through the hallways of Booker T. Washington High School singing freedom songs. The one I liked best went: “And before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.”

The singing continued at after-school rallies at a nearby church. One of my classmates, now a Los Angeles resident, could really stir up the group, singing, “Way Over Yonder” (“I wonder can you hear, can you hear, can you hear, those freedom bells ringing?”)

Anybody listening would be convinced that we heard those “freedom bells ringing.”

The night before the march, I went to the field at the City of St. Jude’s, a Catholic hospital and school, to meet the marchers. It had rained all week. Even as my shoes sank in the mud holes, I felt euphoric.

Nipsey Russell; Peter, Paul and Mary; Dick Gregory and other celebrities entertained us. Many white marchers had come from the North. It was the first time I had seen groups of black and whites friendly with one another in Montgomery.

The next day I missed school with my mother’s blessings for the first time. It was a 3 1/2-mile march from St. Jude’s to the state Capitol. I went with my cousin and classmates.

Most of the marchers sang. I talked incessantly. I told my companions I was scared.

As we started marching, a Southern white spit on a Northern white. We were guarded by 800 Army troops and the federalized Alabama National Guard.

Still, earlier that month, on a day the media labeled Bloody Sunday, state troopers had attacked marchers in Selma, injuring 57 people. I kept asking myself whether I could really depend on the Alabama National Guardsmen to put their accountability to President Lyndon Johnson above their loyalty to the Confederacy.

My hands were sweaty; my heart went blap, blap. At times my legs felt numb. I kept talking to my companions. When they sang, I talked to myself.

Earlier that morning, an elderly woman had called out, “I won’t be ‘round long enough to see no changes, but I’m out here for y’all, my children.” I marched on.

Finally, we reached the Capitol for the rally. I was still nervous. I wondered how an ambulance would get through the crowd of 25,000 if I fainted.

By the time Dr. King spoke, I had let go of my anxieties. In the call-and-response style of the black preacher, Dr. King asked “How long?” and answered, “Not long.”

I believed it wouldn’t be long before life got better for us.

Living through the civil rights movement shaped my black perspective. Twenty-five years later, the lesson of Selma to Montgomery--stand up and be counted, regardless of the consequences--lasts.

I know that malicious, racist attacks on blacks can be given sweet-sounding, intellectual explanations, when blacks are wimpy enough to tolerate such nonsense.

I know that the significance of black issues is diluted when blacks publicly fight or contradict one another to win favor with whites.

I know that one of the best ways for black parents to keep their children’s “eyes on the prize” is to pass on our history so our children can link the past to the present.

I hold onto the proud legacy of Montgomery’s older blacks who will tell anyone, “We showed the world that black folks can stick together.”

When I see the students at Hawthorne and Leuzinger high schools marching here in Los Angeles, in 1990, I want to tell them to stand up for what they believe, that there is still power in numbers, and that organized nonviolent action still works.