Bloody Sunday marchers visit Messiah

attack any time. They didn’t used to call themselves the police. They simply said, ‘I’m the law,’ which gives a whole different meaning.”

WOMEN TELL THE STORY OF SELMA’S HISTORY DURING CHAPEL

Sessions

Two sisters who marched during Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, visited the Messiah campus during the 2023 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Jan. 17.

Speaking at Common Chapel in the morning and then participating in a Q-and-A session that evening, JoAnne Bland and Lynda Blackmon Lowery, who were 11 and 14, respectively, at Bloody Sunday, described their experiences at one of the pivotal moments in civil rights history.

BLOODY SUNDAY

“People that supposedly kept the law were the meanest to us. That didn’t change with the state troopers on the bridge that day for me. On Bloody Sunday and any of the other marches ... I had to be on guard,” said Bland when describing the scene on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that day as she saw the phalanx of police officers awaiting on the other side, “because they may

Lowery, the youngest partic ipant at age 14 in the successful Selma-to-Montgomery March during March 21-25, 1965, was beaten and received multiple stitches—seven over her eye and 28 in the back of her head, a scene she describes in her book “Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom.”

“That’s why I’m still out here, still trying to tell the story, still trying to help somebody else understand what we as children understood back then, and that was that we are somebody,” said Lowery.

MLK’S ASSASSINATION

The sisters recalled hearing Martin Luther King Jr. talk to a crowd of hundreds at Brown Chapel Jan. 2, 1965, inspired by a future that included voting rights for all and three pivotal words: steady loving confrontation. When he was assassinated April 4, 1968, they were devastated.

“It felt like I had lost my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister,” said Lowery. “He had empowered me with those three words … and I didn’t know I was being empowered.”

For her sister, the grief was coupled with further injury.

“The next day—I along with seven others had integrated the white high school,” said Bland. “Our parents made us go to school. The kids were so mean to us. There were several fights. I think they didn’t make a wise decision in sending us to school and not giving us a chance to process that. It was hard. It was one of the worst days of my life.”

A Time To Heal

Bland says progress has been made as the result of the movement, but it’s important to continue to tell their stories so history doesn’t repeat itself.

“Look at this room. When I was growing up, I wouldn’t be in here with these people who are much paler than I am. We had to fight to get there,” she said. “That’s the issue: People who are U.S. citizens are not treated as citizens because of the color of their skin. That’s why we had a movement in the first place.”

Lowery, who spent a career working in mental health, says it took her more than 40 years to talk about the things that happened to her.

“I’ve forgiven the people that gave me this scar over my right eye, this knot on the back of my head. And I can look you in the eye right now and say I do not hate you or anyone else, but I dislike a whole lotta folks—and that’s two different things,” she said.

Living History

Bland says sanitizing this period in history are detrimental. “When you sugarcoat it, it makes the next generation think it’s ok. You know this wasn’t ok. Where do our children get their self-esteem from if not from our stories? If you water it down, we are the ones who get left out. You have to tell the truth, no sugarcoating. It has to be told like it happened to make sure that it never happens again,” said Bland.

— Anna Seip