The March from Selma to Montgomery 50 years later
David L. Warren ‘70 M.Div.
Fifty years ago this March, I was a senior at Washington State University and ASWSU president preparing to graduate. My immediate plans were to accept a Fulbright Scholarship to India to study the influence of H.D.Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience on both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. On March 7, 1965. I watched on television the violence of Bloody Sunday. Individuals marching for the right to vote were brutally beaten, as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They had just begun a courageous 54 mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. At that very moment, the academic abstraction of civil disobedience became for me the harsh reality of violence and death, and a call for a personal commitment.
That event confronted me existentially with the raw racism and fury of segregation, and the extraordinary courage and conviction of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the March organizers. I flew down to Selma with a faculty member and photographer, and on March 21 began with thousands of others the March to Montgomery. For the the first time, I had a glimpse of the lifetime of suffering and discrimination endured by so many March participants, and began to comprehend the white badge of privilege with which I had lived(and still do today).
Bloody Sunday and my four day walk from to Selma to Montgomery changed the trajectory of my life:the central question became how I could act to improve the life chances and alter the life choices of every citizen denied their social, political and economic rights.
India became a case study of how Gandhi changed the course of a nation, shot through with discrimination and oppression, by the exercise of civil disobedience and Satyagraha( peace force). I met with many of Gandhi’s elderly advisors. I discussed the politics and principles of civil disobedience, studied in Gandhi’s ashram and witnessed the slow but steady transformation of chance and choice for the downtrodden of that nation.
The next year I accepted a Rockefeller Scholarship to Yale Divinity School to study the role of the church in the Civil Rights Movement. Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who had lead the 1963 Freedom Rides for Voting Rights, became a mentor and model.
I began to explore with Chaplain Coffin the vital levers of power: the Church, the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements, the New Haven City government and Yale University. My search was for those levers of power – moral suasion, mass organization, the instruments of government to improve employment, housing, education, neighborhoods, and the influence of an institution of higher education to advance society and the individual. I came to believe that these levers could fundamentally alter local politics, could provide opportunity and justice for citizens, and could move a nation toward greater fairness.
During these 50 years, I immersed myself in each of these different but related social institutions–as a mobilizer of church resources, as an organizer in support of the Peace Movement, as an Alderman and Deputy Mayor of New Haven, as President of Ohio Wesleyan University, and now as president of an association of 1000 private colleges and universities lobbying for $170 billion in student aid to make college possible for the neediest.
In each role I have been searching for the most effective and enduring place to plant my foot and push to secure freedom and opportunity for the by-passed, the marginalized, the dispossessed and the victims of discrimination.
The most basic question remains–how to increase the life chances –from the cradle through early education and college, through decent housing and safe neighborhoods–so that we can expand the life choices for a productive and satisfying life?
I have come full circle. I have been deeply involved in each of those institutions and social actions. All must be strengthened. But, my experience places higher education as the key among keys to move the individual, the family, the neighborhood, town and nation forward. Therein lies the political, economic and social opportunity of life chance and life choice.
And so I will return to Selma on Sunday March 8 to cross again the Edmund Pettus Bridge with thousands of other Americans. It is a time to reaffirm the reason we marched then. It is also time to oppose those who would hollow out the right to vote won 50 years ago. We must pass now the the bipartisan Voting Rights Act Amendment of 2015, and reclaim and secure the rights owed every citizen of this nation.
David L. Warren ‘70 M.Div.
President NAICU
MLK was at Yale speaking in the mid 50’s and spent the afternoon and a march later with several students, including my husband, Bruce Ergood, M.R.E. 1958 - who went on to teach non-violent resistance and protests while working for the AFSC in the late 50’s and early 60’s. YDS was a leader in social justice thinking and action and thanks go to the faculty who engendered this.
Jane Ergood, ‘58 M.N.
(Just back from a trip with our 2015 Mission (501,(3)(c) Honduras Health). Social Justice needs help in many places.)
I graduated from the Yale Divinity School in 1952, with a B.D. degree, (Now called the M.Div.)
I remember watching the Sunday TV news one evening in March of 1965, covering the protest march in Selma, Alabama. I could not believe my eyes. State Troopers on horseback were charging and beating protesters trying to walk over a bridge on their way to the state capital in Montgomery. My shock turned to anger as the raw brutality of the event unfolded before me. The following Monday, Martin Luther King Jr.issued a nation-wide call to all Christian clergy and religious in the country to come to Selma to continue the march on the following Tuesday. I had served a church in San Francisco that was 50% black, 45% white, and 5% Asian. On Monday I decided that I needed to respond to Dr. King, go to Selma to continue the march. I had been with Dr.King in Jackson, Mississippi, in July of 1961. I was arrested and jailed there as a Freedom Rider, because I was trying to eat in the airport coffee shop with black friends.
On Tuesday in Selma, I heard Dr. King speak so eloquently to several hundred of us in Browns Chapel in preparation for the march. Andrew Young also spoke, telling us of the many ways that we could be injured, beaten, how to protect ourselves if we were attacked. He scared the beJesus out of us. We were instructed to march in a column, five abreast. The women marchers were told to be in the center of the line of five, where they would be more protected from the hostile crowd. I was edgy and a bit scared. When our part of the line reached the bridge entrance, we were told to stop. We waited, wondered for about fifteen minutes, and then were told to turn around and march back down into Selma. We were amazed and puzzled. What was going on? When we returned to Browns Chapel, the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee members were furious. They thought that Dr. King had sold them out by turning the march around. The story that I heard later was that Dr. King had talked to the federal judge who told him that because of some legality, the march could not go forward on Tuesday, but he would allow it to go forward a week later with federal marshals guarding the marchers. That was why Dr. King delayed the march, but the SNCC memers didn’t know that, and thought that King had sold them out.
That night I was on the sidewalks of Selma, looking for a place to eat. In another part of town James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from New England was also on the sidewalks of Selma, where some locals called him an outside agitator, he was beaten and killed. I flew back to San Francisco and safety the following Wednesday. Whenever I am asked to speak in public about my Selma experiences, I always dedicate my talk or sermon to the memory of James Reeb.
Francis Geddes, ’52 M.Div
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