Blog
Walk half a mile in someone’s shoes
“Walk a mile in someone’s shoes,” the saying goes. It’s true. I discovered more about the 1965 Civil Rights marches and of myself doing that.
Last year, I found myself in Selma, Ala. to walk the same steps the Selma to Montgomery marchers walked 60 years before on Bloody Sunday. We’ve seen documentaries, and many of us have watched the 2014 movie Selma.
I decided to go for a walk in Selma following the march route from the Brown Chapel AME Church all the way to the Edmund Pettus Bridge where the marchers were turned back by tear gas and club-wielding state troopers the first time. The distance is only about half a mile.
At the church is a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. that looks out over the street to greet any who would approach.
I started walking. Unlike future Congressman John Lewis 60 years earlier, I didn’t have a backpack with overnight items anticipating my arrest. I had my Canon 5D MKIV and a bottle of water.
I headed south past an apartment complex. There was a brisk wind that day, slightly different from the cloudy day the marchers encountered on Bloody Sunday. Perhaps a sign of things to come.
I turned right onto Selma Ave. The streets were empty. De Soto came through here in 1541 and noted the place for its iron ore. Since then industry has come and gone. It is sadly a town that is past its prime. Nowadays, people drive through without giving much thought to the people or events that happened on these streets. Why should they, we’ve progressed since then, haven’t we?
I turned left onto Broad Street. There’s a 30 mile an hour speed limit, but the cars were passing me like they were driving down an interstate. An elderly gentleman using a walker and his health aid walked by me. We waved at each other.
I looked off into the distance, and gasped, ahead are the steel girders and arches of The Edmund Pettus Bridge. Constructed in 1940 to span the Alabama River, it was named after Confederate general, U.S. Senator and Klan Grand Dragon, Edmund Pettus. Pettus’ grave is in nearby Old Live Oak Cemetery where it is constantly tended, and Confederate flags are placed around the marker.
I stopped for a few photos. Cars whizzed by without a care in the world. The arch design of the bridge made the sidewalk more of a climb than a casual walk. I’d seen the photos and video of the march but didn’t realize how steep the grade was. The arch of the bridge hangs high above the water. One of the survivors told me that on Bloody Sunday people were forced to jump off the bridge into the water. That’s a long way down, and it speaks to desperation.
I got to the top, and I had to take a minute: those marchers on Bloody Sunday could look down and see the state troopers and sheriff’s deputies armed with billy clubs and tear gas who were there to stop them. Yet they marched into history. That’s courage.
I got to the bottom, to the park that served as an address for marchers to register in the marches later that month. There is a message carved into a stone monument nearby: “. . . when your children ask their fathers, ‘What is the meaning of these stones?’ You are to tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ ”