Chapter 35: Freedom's Call

I was a seventeen-year-old kid on the evening of March 7th, 1965 when I joined my family gathered around our RCA television. Sunday night were movie night and that evening’s movie was a doozy. The American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was showing the Academy Award-winning film, Judgment at Nuremberg.

I made some popcorn with extra butter and took a seat in one of the side chairs. The sofa was reserved for my mother and stepfather.

About twenty minutes into the broadcast, ABC News suddenly interrupted the movie with a special news bulletin. Earlier in the day, Alabama state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas had savagely broken up a civil rights march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.

With my snack in one hand and a soda pop in the other, I leaned forward and watched in horror as a phalanx of troopers charged a line of unresting marchers attempting to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama.

The confusing and violent video was graphic and intense. The smack and crack sound of police Billy clubs crushing bones and smashing flesh could be clearly heard above the screams. Clouds of teargas settled like an ocean over the retreating marchers. All that was visible were the shark fins of rising and falling police clubs swimming through the crowd.

As the scene was replayed I glanced over at my stepfather. His hands were balled into fists and his tense body trembled as his face flushed with anger and he fought to control his fury. As a Unitarian minister who started his religious life as a circuit riding Southern Baptist preacher in the back hills of Tennessee, he knew the ways of Klan and he despised them.

My mother and stepfather were friends or colleagues of many of the clergy members from Massachusetts who had answered Dr. King’s call to join him in Selma. Hundreds of religious leaders converged on Selma to march with Reverend King and bring a message supporting voter rights to Governor Wallace in Montgomery. My parents feared for friends who might have been injured by police.

One of the friends they were worried about was a Unitarian minister from Boston named James Reeb. Two days later on March 11th, Reverend Reed was murdered as he and two other Unitarian ministers were beaten with clubs by four members of the Klu Klux Klan as they walked down a Selma street...

I shared my step dad’s anger. American’s getting beaten because they demanded that same rights as whites. I could see the racism all around me, in school, among friends, and when groups of adults would talk like kids didn’t have ears.

“You know, they gotta learn their place ... He’s an uppity n-word ... I support civil rights but they are asking for too much ... Why can’t it be like it was before outside agitators came done here ... I wouldn’t want one living in my neighborhood.”

The images of the Confederate battle flag on the front license plates of the State Police cars and the savage attack on peaceful protesters galvanized me, my family, and millions of other citizens like nothing we had seen before. The struggle for equality had become very real and emotionally personal.

I vowed that if I had to choose where to stand on the road to freedom, it would be in front of the clubs of the oppressors and not behind them.

My brother journeyed to Selma and documented Reverend Doctor King’s third march as a photojournalist for the Sandusky Register and a freelance photographer for the Associated Press. The photos he took of Martin Luther King and the freedom marchers are part of my families’ history in the struggle for equality and justice. They hang today in my home, next to my great-great grandfather’s certificate of service as a member of the Grand Army of the Republic and his military service in the civil war which secured the freedom of an oppressed race.

In the words of my grandfather, “The work of freedom is never finished. It is always just beginning.”