Guest opinion: Events at Selma spur renewal

I am still thinking about what I saw and heard in Selma, Alabama, last month.

On my return, I wrote three words on my office door, “Remember, Recommit, Restore,” words that I saw on a T-shirt in Selma. I wish that I had taken photographs of T-shirts; it seemed that each person was wearing a different one, communicating personal feelings and reasons for being there.

At work, no one has asked me about those words on my door, which is fine; they are there for me, to remind me of what I saw and heard.

On Friday, March 6, I saw hundreds of schoolchildren walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon. The sun was out, the sky blue, the weather warm, and they were clearly happier to be there than in class. I wondered what their teachers had told them about Bloody Sunday, what their parents have told them. Only later did I learn that 67 percent of children live below the poverty line in Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat.

A Selma elementary school librarian told me in a phone conversation that she is “desperate” for new books for her children, a school in which 80.4 percent of the children receive a free or discounted lunch.

Poverty was the focus at a “Community Hearing on Poverty, a Renewal of Rev. Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign” at historic Brown Chapel that Friday afternoon. The Rev. Dr. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and a key leader of the Moral Monday demonstrations in North Carolina, and Cornell Brooks, national president of the NAACP, refocused attention from commemoration and remembering to recommitment to action. The Rev. Barber reminded us, “You got to go and get in the way” of injustice and “the moral madness.”

Both reminded the singing, clapping audience that much needs to be done. The march continues.

That evening, we had dinner in Montgomery with Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, who will be speaking in Spokane on April 14. We talked about his work with death row prisoners, the U.S Supreme Court, the EJI’s recent report on the history of lynching, and his book, “Just Mercy,” and how writing that book has made him less safe. The march continues.

Rather than battling crowds and long lines on Saturday, the day President Obama visited Selma, we decided to visit civil rights sites in Montgomery. But for that decision we would never have met Wanda Battle, schoolteacher, member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and tour guide extraordinaire. We knew that Dr. King had been the pastor there during the Montgomery bus boycott; what we did not know and what Battle told us was that, in 1979, former Gov. George Wallace made an unexpected appearance at a Sunday service and asked for forgiveness. When I think there is little hope for change, my go-to image will be Battle telling that story with warmth and passion.

Then, on Sunday morning, we stood at the foot of Edmund Pettus Bridge and “had church,” watching the livestream of the Brown Chapel worship service. Among the speakers were the Rev. Jesse Jackson; the Rev. Andrew Young; Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who called for the restoration of the Voting Rights Act; Attorney General Eric Holder; and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The bridge congregation sang and clapped and shouted, “Amen!” And then we walked across the bridge together.

One of my dearest friends whom I consider my muse accompanied me on this trip. These were her thoughts about that moment: “So here I was a diminutive white woman, in this context a reminder of the oppressor race, but never have I felt so safe, so welcome, so woven into the charge for future action. This is not a gift I take for granted. I go home with renewed commitment to extend that kind of hospitality to others.” The march continues.

Remember. Recommit. Restore.