Crossing a Bridge to the Past--and Future

They were, many of them, children from homes where parents didn’t vote, and this journey was an effort to make them think about the horrible price earlier generations had paid for that simple privilege.

They rode into the Deep South from South-Central Los Angeles, 40 of them, some ex-gang members, some high school dropouts, still uncertain about how to connect to today’s world, let alone to history.

They rode nonstop for nearly two full days, winding up in sleepy Selma, Ala., to cross a bridge, to walk back into a simpler, grainy, black-and-white era when moral challenges were clear and good and evil walked on opposite sides of the street.

There were people like Lakesha Harris, 18, who left her 2-year-old daughter home with a large family, none of whom she’d ever known to cast a vote; Anthony Campos, a 27-year-old who dropped out of school in the sixth grade and had always been afraid to vote because he couldn’t read, and Trevan Lynn, 28, who only recently began to grapple with the emotional scars from a severe gunshot wound more than a decade earlier.

*

They were brought to Selma to cross a bridge last Sunday, the bridge where 31 years ago almost to the day a group of civil rights activists began a trek to the Alabama state Capitol in Montgomery to demand that African Americans be given the right to vote.

The Selma-to-Montgomery marchers only got about 15 blocks, across the famed Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they met club-wielding, tear gas-tossing state troopers and sheriff’s deputies who put a brutal end to the protest as a horrified national television audience watched in revulsion. It was one of the defining moments of the 1960s civil rights revolution.

Could the catharsis of crossing the same bridge help young people focus their lives--or simply just vote? That’s what Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) was betting when she obtained funding from a black women’s professional group and invited these sojourners to ride. She was determined to pass history down to what she calls a new and more desperate generation, “the folks who have been dropped off America’s agenda.”

“We don’t have the luxury of talking about, ‘We don’t believe in the political system,’ ” Waters would tell them after she flew to Selma from Washington. “We don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Let somebody else do it.’ Tell that to your great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers--they’d turn over in their graves.”

One of the riders did not have to be convinced. Andre Brown had already lost his right to vote. Brown, 21, didn’t get to make the trip until the last minute, when a reluctant parole officer finally gave him permission. He is a convicted felon who served 2 1/2 years in prison after robbing a Pasadena bank.

“You don’t really, really appreciate the vote until it’s taken away,” Brown said as the bus passed through the endlessness of Texas. “It’s like you don’t have a voice.”

They had all crowded onto the bus the previous Thursday, 39 blacks and one Latino, outside the offices of Youth Fair Chance in South-Central, where many sought counseling and help in completing their education. Selma was to be another milestone in that journey.

To prepare, program coordinators had played a segment of the award-winning documentary “Eyes on the Prize.” Participants were told, among other things, of the 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, whose swollen and disfigured body was fished out of the Tallahatchee River days after two vengeful white men rousted him from his bed for flirting with a white woman.

Traveling to the South “is not a joke,” warned the trip’s coordinator, Marva Smith. Don’t bring drugs or alcohol, they were told, carry identification and leave “negative Los Angeles attitudes” behind.

Smith, 30, recalled the childhood memory of the three grinding days her family had spent on a Greyhound bus in the 1970s, dining on fried chicken prepared by her mother, as they came to L.A. from Dallas. It was a trip many African Americans from the South made after World War II, searching for the Promised Land. This ride, while bone-tiring, would be faster and far less agonizing.

Still, there were moments. In the diners and the diesel stops, the baggy-pants-wearing, tattooed travelers from L.A. received stares and occasional calls for security from store clerks. When an 18-year-old traveler commented that a chicken salad sandwich looked a little too much like tuna fish for her taste, the white waitress in Abilene, Texas, snapped back: “I don’t know where you’re from, but down here this is how we make chicken salad sandwiches.”

The riders reached Selma in time to participate in two days of annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee festivities that drew thousands from throughout the nation. The city’s nine motels were booked solid. The National Voting Rights Museum, once the home of the old White Citizens’ Council, coordinated the festivities, holding some events at George Wallace Community College.

After listening to the stories from the living legends, seeing molds of the original marchers’ footprints in the voting rights museum and praying in the historic red brick Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church--where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, and where weeks before the march King had met Malcolm X for the only time--the young people were ready to cross the bridge.

The tension of the 1960s lingered in the air. Days before their arrival, a century-old Selma church was burned to the ground--one of a rash of mysterious black church fires that have spread throughout the South. The home of an African American judge was hit with a shotgun blast, and a monument dedicated to Viola Liuzzo, a white volunteer from Detroit who was shot to death while driving to pick up marchers from Montgomery, was desecrated.

With this backdrop, the group joined thousands of others and crossed the bridge. They marched behind a banner that read “From South-Central to Selma.” They sang the old freedom song: “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around, turn us around, turn us around. . . .”

The physical experience blended with the voices they heard as they marched:

It was here to Selma that Dr. King came in 1965, shortly after receiving his Nobel Peace Prize. He proclaimed that the civil rights struggle would move toward demanding federal guarantees of the ballot. For weeks, Selma’s jails were bursting at the seams. Then, on March 7, the Rev. Hosea Williams and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s John Lewis began the march across the Pettus Bridge.

“I’m going to vote as soon as I turn 18,” said Tazie Ashley, 17. “If I could get everybody in my housing project--Avalon Gardens--to vote, I would. It’s important.”

No one expected the blood bath that followed on what would forever be called Bloody Sunday, but more than 100 were injured, and 16 hospitalized. Overnight, Selma aroused national indignation. President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed he would send a voting rights bill to Congress. He dramatically invoked the anthem of the civil rights movement: “. . . And we shall overcome.” By summer--days before the Watts riots began--it was law.

Marvin Volrie, 18, got butterflies in his stomach. Jamal Patton, 18, said he was experiencing something like “flashbacks.”

“I could see the police, beating people. I could hear the voices screaming. I had this feeling like I was really there,” Patton said.

*

The South-Central marchers were, at times, ambivalent about what they were seeing. Some were struck by how different the slower, subdued environment of the South was from Los Angeles. While their own lives were lived with a melange of races, here life seemed to still be defined as black versus white. They had ridden here as a disparate group: teenage mothers, dropouts struggling to get their high school diplomas, ex-Crips, ex-Bloods. Slowly, in the monotony that is a cross-country bus ride, a cohesion had developed, and its complexity clashed with what felt like a simpler place mired in the past.

“I just don’t feel all the anguish and pain” of the 1960s, Andre Brown said. “It’s not like I’m saying to forget the past, but I can’t blame everything on the white man. I have a white parole officer, a white judge and a white lawyer. But I have to accept the fact that the judge didn’t rob the bank; I did. It is up to me to change my life around.”

They had listened to voices like Lynda Lowery, a Selma resident who was 15 at the time of the march. “I still have a knot in my head from the clubbing I received from the police that day,” she told them. “They put me in jail for seven days and all they fed me was black-eyed peas. I still can’t eat black-eyed peas today.”

Not everyone was moved.

“They live like they are stuck in 1965,” said Lakesha Harris. “I kept thinking, ‘Do anybody play basketball, do anybody go to a party?’ “I didn’t talk to anyone on a social level.”

The next day, Monday, they set off on the long road to Los Angeles. There were more discussions about the vote, how to use it to your advantage, what power it has. Marva Smith felt she was still hearing misunderstanding and fear in their voices. Fear because when you commit yourself to vote, you commit yourself to reading thick, detailed, intimidating ballot information, deciphering jargon.

Finally, near Phoenix, Smith asked if anybody would be interested in a class that explained more about voting.

Most of the hands went up.

The bus made good time, moving just ahead of storms and tornadoes that routinely ravage the Southeast. In Los Angeles skies were clearing, and the ground was still wet. It was a couple of hours before dawn in Los Angeles on Tuesday when they got home. There had been crowds of TV cameras when they’d departed on Thursday. Now there were none. They were on their own again, with more bridges to cross.