Forty-eight years ago this month, our country
was changed by a group of people united across lines of religion, gender,
class, and race. Four of them – a
young black Baptist deacon, a white Unitarian Universalist minister, a white
Episcopal seminarian, and a white Unitarian Universalist Detroit laywoman –
were murdered, shocking the conscience of the country, and resulting in the
passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In the winter and spring of 1965, Martin Luther
King, Jr. and his lieutenants assumed leadership of a voting rights drive in
Selma, Alabama, launching a campaign that they hoped would force Congress to
enfranchise blacks across the South.
After “Bloody Sunday,” when state troopers set upon peaceful marchers on
the Edmund Pettus Bridge, King called for support from religious leaders across
the country, and thousands of clergy, students, and lay people rushed to Selma. Never before in history had so many people
of all faiths and classes and colors come together to stand for human liberty.
Selma was no walk in the park; the campaign had
already claimed one life, Jimmy Lee
Jackson, the youngest deacon in the history of St. James Baptist Church, who was shot while trying to
protect his mother during an attack by police inside a crowded café following a
peaceful protest. Still, over 100
UUs responded to King, among them ministers Clark Olsen, Orloff Miller, James Reeb, Cliff Hoffman, and laymen
Henry Hampton and Robert Hoehler.
After a demonstration on March 10, Olsen,
Miller, and Reeb ate dinner at a black cafe, and were attacked as they were
leaving by 4 white men with clubs.
Olsen and Miller were roughed up, but Reeb was hit squarely on his
temple, and died the next day.
After watching Reeb’s funeral on TV, Detroit UU Viola Liuzza told her husband and kids,
“I’ve got to go.” Taking the
family car, she arrived in Selma and was made a shuttle driver with Leroy
Moton, a 19-year-old Selma native, as her guide. On March 25, returning to Selma from Montgomery, a carload
of KKKers, one of them an FBI informant, fired a shotgun directly at Liuzza,
killing her instantly. Moton,
covered in her blood, played dead and thus survived.
The fourth Selma martyr was Jonathan Daniels, a young white Episcopalian seminarian from New
Hampshire. Despite the murders of
Jim Reeb and Viola Liuzza, he had bravely stayed on, trying to change the
hearts and minds of white Episcopalians in Selma, teaching in voter
registration schools, and driving volunteers. He was killed by a shotgun blast from a white storekeeper
that summer. The storekeeper
pleaded self-defense and was acquitted.
Jackson, Reeb, Luizza, and Daniels. They remind us that freedom and
equality are ex-pensive; some paid with their lives. They leave to us their
unfinished work of equality and dignity – work that can only be done by people
united across all the barriers that separate us. May they inspire us in the work that remains.
