A visit to Selma

with a remarkable tour guide

If you’ve read Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, you know that who tells history’s stories makes a difference. Maybe you knew this already, from negative experience—old textbooks that never engaged you, teachers who left out part of the story that you had to piece together later. Or maybe it was the opposite—a teacher who knew the right books to give you, someone in your family with a powerful storytelling ability, and who lived through a lot.

Today we met a remarkable person, Dianne Harris, who led us on a historic tour of Selma, Alabama. Ms. Harris, who was 15 years old on Bloody Sunday, grew up in Selma in a single parent home that was deeply connected to the church and the community. Her mother worked in a cigar factory in Selma—”a terrible place to work,” Harris later realized—and sent Harris and her younger brother to the Alabama Lutheran Academy (later Concordia College). At lunch one day, a local student organizer invited a group of students to leave campus to help plan marches and demonstrations.

This was not long after the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young man from Selma who’d attended at a night march in support James Orange, an officer with the SCLC who’d just been arrested; fleeing attacking police, Jackson entered a café with his grandfather and mother and tried to protect them. A state trooper shot him at point-blank range. He was taken to a segregated, less-resourced hospital, and eight days later he died. Before he died, he met with Dr. King, who said that he would “never forget […] how radiantly he still responded, how he mentioned the freedom movement and how he talked about the faith that he still had in his God.”

The work Jackson had been involved in was all related to voting rights, Harris told us. She explained that at the time, very few Black people in Alabama were registered to vote—not because they didn’t want to vote, but because the obstacles were so great.

A former elementary educator, Harris brought along what she called “show and tell” items to make this point—a bar of soap, a jar of jelly beans, some stapled pieces of paper. These were all part of the literacy tests Black people faced when they attempted to register: a long and complex test not given to white people; impossible questions like: how many jelly beans are in this jar? Or, how many bubbles are in a bar of soap? How many drops of water in the Alabama River?

Harris and her younger brother wanted to help make sure that people like their mother, and eventually themselves, could vote. So they followed the organizing captain, along with 18 other students, to the church where students were organizing. They were welcomed and applauded—and for the next week, Harris, her brother, and many of their classmates went back every day. They were in what she called “a different kind of school,” where they learned freedom songs, studied the principles of nonviolence, and were taught safety rules. They also marched, and were attacked and arrested and taken to jail.

One of the most powerful things about hearing history directly from a person who lived it, instead of reading it from a plaque on a wall, is that they can respond to the people in the room. Dianne Harris noticed Bea in our group, and connected with us through her own complex relationship to defiance as a young person—how she didn’t want to disobey the teachers who told her not to march (some of these teachers also marched in the teachers’ marches), how she tried to tell her mother the truth about what they did and planned to do. In the end, she could not help but follow the singing marchers on March 7. Harris assured her brother, when he reminded her that they’d promised not to march, that they’d stay in the back.

“We attempted to march,” she told us. The truth, she said, was important, and she did not step foot on the Edmund Pettus Bridge before being turned back by screaming people attacked by state troopers, violent possemen on horseback, and tear gas. They fled back to the church that had been their sanctuary, where they were given first aid. Once home, she got what she called “the whipping of my life.”

But throughout this time her mother helped house visiting activists, and later she allowed Harris and her brother to take bus ride to Montgomery on March 24 for the last leg of the march. They camped with other young activists, stayed up all night listening to musicians like Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joan Baez, who’d come to support the cause. The next day, they marched with 25,000 people and heard King give his “How Long, Not Long” speech.

Her mother voted that fall, and every election for the rest of her life. Harris has also never missed an election, state or local, since she turned 21. And the work she began in 1965 continues today. “I transport people to the polls,” she said. “I man the telephone to see if people need rides. I’m in a sorority, and we canvass voters all around Selma. I have my very own bullhorn.”

Ms. Harris walked with us across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, then took us to the National Voting Rights Museum.

I think what has stood out to me the most on the trip so far is this table, showing the voter registration percentages of Black citizens in Southern states before and after the Voting Rights Act, signed into law on August 6, 1965:

“Look how much they went up!” Bea said, tracing her finger from .4 percent (in 1940) to 74 percent in 1984—there was a steady rise in every state, but the change in Alabama was especially striking.

Remarkable Dianne Harris—only fifteen years old in 1965—was a part of that. And she still is. Registering people to vote, driving them to the polls, and talking to visitors like us about Selma’s past as well as its present. Always with honesty and frankness, but also through the lens of yet. As in, we’re not there yet, but we’re working on it. We were lucky to learn history from her today.

P.S. Dianne Harris encourages everyone to read this Washington Post article, “Selma is tired of being just a symbol—it wants change.”

Tomorrow we’re headed to Birmingham. We hope you’re having a great week, and we are so glad to have you reading along.