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Selma” Sunday, March 1, 2015 Rev 1 “Selma” Sunday, March 1, 2015 Rev. Bruce Southworth, Senior Minister The Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist This morning I offer some stories surrounding Selma and the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, with the Selma to Montgomery March a few weeks later. For Women’s History month, let’s begin with Annie Lee Cooper. An African American, she is best known as the civil rights activist in Selma, Alabama who punched Sheriff Jim Clark. She then received a beating by the sheriff, was charged with “criminal provocation”, went to jail for 11 hours, and sang spirituals while there. Annie Lee Cooper was a Selma native, age 54 at the time of her run-in with Jim Clark. As a teenager she had moved first to Kentucky to live with an older sister, and then worked in Pennsylvania running a restaurant. Three years earlier in 1962, she had returned to her childhood home to care for her mother. Having been a registered voter in Pennsylvania and Ohio, she was indignant that she could not vote in Alabama. For attempting to register to vote in Selma, she was fired from her job in a nursing home. In January 1965, there was an ongoing protest in front of the Dallas County Courthouse as blacks sought to register to vote. The Montgomery Advertiser, on the occasion of Ms. Cooper’s 100th birthday, reported the following: The Sheriff ordered her and others to vacate the area, at which time, “Sheriff Jim Clark claimed … (Cooper) slugged him. She said he (had) hit her, and reported, ‘I was just standing there when his deputies told a man with us to move, and when he didn't, they tried to kick him,’ Cooper said last week. ‘That's when (Clark) and I got into it.’" “(Sheriff) Clark prodded Cooper in the neck with a billy club until Cooper turned around and knocked the sheriff in the jaw. Deputies then wrestled Cooper down as Clark continued to beat her repeatedly with his club.” http://archive.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20100602/NEWS02/6020357/Woman-known-run- sheriff-turns-100-today Most but not all the protestors were non-violent, and from time to time there were lapses in discipline. Oprah Winfrey as a producer of the film Selma initially had no intention to be a member of the cast, but was convinced to play Annie Lee Cooper. 1 © 2015 Rev. Bruce Southworth 2 About a month later, the provocation for the Selma to Montgomery March occurred in Marion, Alabama.... Jimmie Lee Jackson, a leader in St. John’s Baptist church in Marion followed his heart. One account describes the details this way (Ari Berman in The Nation magazine): “On February 18, 1965, James Orange … (was organizing) young people in a voter registration drive (while working) … with Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.… (He) was arrested in Marion, Alabama, thirty miles from Selma…. [The charge was “contributing to the delinquency of minors.”] Word spread through the black community that Orange would be lynched that night in the county jail off the town’s main square. Two hundred civil rights activists gathered at Zion United Methodist Church to hold a rare night march to the jail, where they would sing freedom songs outside. (Rev. C. T. Vivian led the way.) [They were met at the Post Office by a line of Marion City police officers, sheriff's deputies, and Alabama State Troopers. During the standoff, streetlights were abruptly turned off (some sources say they were shot out by the police), and the police began to beat the protesters. Among those beaten were two United Press International photographers, whose cameras were smashed, and NBC News correspondent Richard Valeriani, who was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized. The marchers turned and scattered back towards the church. - Wikipedia] The … [marchers] included 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, a deacon and woodcutter (and army veteran) who had tried to register to vote five times in Perry County, where only 265 of 5,202 eligible black voters were on the voting rolls. Jackson, his mother Viola, and his 82-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, fled for safety at nearby Mack’s Café. State troopers stormed in and began beating Jackson’s grandfather and mother. When Jackson lunged to protect his mother, an Alabama state trooper shot him point-blank in the stomach. He was sent to Selma’s segregated Good Samaritan Hospital, where Col. Al Lingo of the Alabama Department of Public Safety served him with a warrant for assault and battery with the intent to murder an Alabama state trooper, even though the police had been the clear aggressors. Jackson died eight days later. Historian Taylor Branch called him “the first martyr” of the Selma voting rights struggle. 2 © 2015 Rev. Bruce Southworth 3 At a mass meeting at Selma’s Brown Chapel, King aide James Bevel introduced the idea of marching from Selma to Montgomery to protest Jackson’s death. As the film Selma depicts, SNCC – the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – had been in Selma for some time, a couple of years, when Dr. King and his colleagues with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference saw the strategic possibilities there, in part because of the well-known belligerence of Sheriff Clark. To reiterate, the issue was voting rights. Darryl Pinckney offers helpful background and describes the events in his article “Some Different Ways of Looking at Selma.” (New York Review of Books, 2/19/15} Dr. King had early on raised the issue saying, “’Give us the ballot,’… at a prayer … (meeting) in Washington, D.C., in 1957.” However, in the ensuing 8 years, there had been little success registering new voters or gaining support of Federal courts. For example, Selma was the county seat in Dallas County, Alabama, and there were 325 blacks registered, with 15,000 eligible, plus 12,000 whites registered. No blacks were registered to vote in two neighboring counties [of Wilcox and Lowndes]. Protest “marches had been banned.” Together with Ralph Abernathy, vice-president of the Southern Christian Leadership Convention, King arrived in Selma on January 2, 1965, hoping for increased confrontation with southern authority.… To arouse the conscience of Congress or the nation, he needed the attention, the cameras, which meant demonstrators risking arrest, sitting in jails filled to capacity, and worse. King expected bloodshed in Selma – his own. For those with a good sense of history, you recall 1964 as Freedom Summer with the Mississippi Summer Project, which had engendered support from college students across the nation, with the goal of establishing freedom schools and registering black voters, whose rights had been denied since 1890. Among them were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from here in NY, and Mississippi native James Chaney. They were killed in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and these events were depicted in the 1988 film, Mississippi Burning. In January and February, the SCLC began to hold rallies and marches, with Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy and 250 others arrested on February 1. A week later, black citizens peaceably marched again, and James Bevel was assaulted by Sheriff Clark with a billy club 3 © 2015 Rev. Bruce Southworth 4 on the courthouse steps. State troopers also used their clubs and cattle prods in making over 50 arrests. Among those put in jail for a week were three whites, who had joined the march… two Unitarian Universalist ministers and a catholic lay theologian. (Morrison-Reed, p. 97) That whites were being arrested made national news. Many denominations supported the civil rights projects throughout the South and, and like others, the Unitarian Universalist Association had supported site visits and volunteering among its staff, ministers and members. It was one of these visits, which took him to Selma, that our Senior Minister, Donald Szantho Harrington, participated in a prayer service for Sheriff Jim Clark, who had been hospitalized for a heart attack. This was held outside the hospital with other clergy and lay people, including the minister of Brown Chapel, which was the AME church where most of the rallies and the SCLC organizing took place. In reporting to our congregation a few weeks later, Dr. Harrington said that the prayer was “a simple, honest, open action,” heart-felt, without cynicism. He went on to observe that Selma now seemed to be “the moral hub of the universe.” (Community Pulpit, 3/7/1965) A week or so after those prayers for the sheriff, the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion changed everything. Plans for the march from Selma to the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery began to take shape. It was led by John Lewis of SNCC and Hosea Williams of SCLC. Dr. King was not there in part because he needed to be at his home church in Atlanta having missed many recent Sundays. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, the 600 marchers were brutally attacked and dispersed by state troopers and locals deputized by Clark. The savage assaults, which led to more than 50 hospitalized, were broadcast across the nation. Amelia Boynton, who had helped plan the march with Bevel, was among those knocked unconscious. Dr. King put out his summons for the nation’s clergy to join in a renewed march for the following Tuesday, and 2500 participants showed up, including over 60 Unitarian Universalist ministers, about 10% of our clergy then. From Dr. King: “In the vicious maltreatment of defenseless citizens of Selma, where old women and young children were gassed and clubbed at random, we have witnessed an eruption of the disease of racism which seeks to destroy all America.
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