Below is a black & white news photo from late February, 1965. It turned up a few years back (hat tip to the sharp-eyed Lewis Lewis): it was taken on the steps of Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama when John Lewis (center-left, with a tie) announced the plan to march from Selma to Montgomery.

The goal of the march was winning voting rights for southern Blacks, after three generations of formal disfranchisement; but the plan was sparked by the police killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson. I’m at the far right, behind Andrew Young (who is also in a tie).

I had been in Selma since the beginning of the year, and the active phase of the campaign, as a rookie member of Dr. King’s staff. I had marched often, served some days in jail, and was learning a lot very fast.

That was then.

Forty-three years later, one sunny day in April 2018, I woke up again in Selma Alabama, once more prepared to go to jail.

This time, it was just for a friendly visit, with two new acquaintances: Andy Grace and Chip Brantley. I met up with them first, for a generous southern breakfast at Mr. Waffle, on Highland Avenue, with my pants cinched up tight: It’s The Law.

Andy and Chip were teaching  journalism at the University of Alabama. They were working on a big podcast project about Selma intended for NPR. It’s about two civil rights murders there, and is now online, at their website, as “White Lies.”

In their research they found my two books on Selma, and tracked me down, asking about an interview. Turns out, I was planning to visit Alabama before long, to be on a panel in Montgomery marking the 50th anniversary of Dr, King’s murder.

As a certified living fossil on the shelf of artifacts from a genuine piece of “history,”  I’ve done a few such events. So I offered to make a side trip to Selma, and give them my personal guided tour with the interview.

[LEFT: my history of the Selma Movement; still in print.]

 

The tour starts with the Selma jail. On the way we passed the compact corner memorial to James Reeb, a Boston Unitarian minister, who was attacked with two others in the heat of the movement, and died of a fractured skull the next day. Three men were tried for his murder, acquitted by an all-white jury; all are now dead.

But there was talk of a fourth man there, who evaded prosecution, and could be still alive. Chip and Andy were in search of him.

I had no leads about that, so we moved on to the jail. It’s still where it was, though in 1965 it was part of City Hall. That’s moved, and the Police now have the whole building. High on the wall of the downstairs hallway is a photo of Wilson Baker, who arrested me. Later he became Sheriff, and word is he was a good one. Up on the second floor, the small cellblock remains.

Those yellow bars even now look solid enough to withstand the collapse of the whole block. Which may not be far off — the collapse that is; most of the buildings close by look empty, boarded up or just abandoned.

As a landmark of black liberation, I told Andy and Chip, Selma fifty-plus years later is a hot mess. The poverty rate is as high as it was in the ‘60s. More than a dozen payday loan shops, their vampiric essence camouflaged by bright colors, crouched along Broad and Highland, the two main business streets. The house where I rented a room in ‘65, a solid Black middle class dwelling then, stood empty, literally falling down, like so many others on that, the “historic” side of town. If there’s any money in that heritage, it looks like payday usury vacuumed it all up.

History is still plentiful in Selma, if ramshackle, but there’s only one spot of beauty I remember, and I discovered that late: less than a mile west of the Pettus Bridge downtown stands the Live Oak Cemetery, often called the New Live Oak, though it goes back to the 1820s.

 

The big moss-draped trees, the greyed, crumbling, mostly Confederate headstones and slabs, the multi-colored lichen splotches on almost everything, all are classic, archetypal, undead Old South: Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, only in color.

New Live Oak has recently been made newer by construction of an elaborate memorial in honor of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

This shrine is the work of a local Neo-confederate group, which won a long, acrimonious court fight with the Black-led city administration for control of an acre of land there.

 

 

 

 

Forrest had only a brief connection to Selma: he attempted to defend the city from surging Union forces shortly before Robert E. Lee’s surrender in April 1865.

Even so, for true Neo-Confederates, Forrest is an immortal, an icon: a brilliant tactician, a relentless, fearsome  fighter (biographers say he personally killed thirty Union soldiers in hand-to-hand combat) and a founder (and first Grand Wizard) of the original Ku Klux Klan. (A revealing 8-minute interview with these two Neo-Confederates is online here.)

There could hardly be a visage more discordant – or revealing — than that of Forrest, glowering east over General Pettus’s grave and toward the eponymous bridge which the courage of local blacks, and tagalongs like me, turned into a civil rights landmark. The local devotees of Forrest’s flock have struck back with pro-Confederate billboards, and more solidly, with this shrine.

But I can turn my back on Forrest; then it’s no wonder I linger there. Andy and Chip did too; pictures of them at New Live Oak are on NPR’s publicity webpage for “White Lies.”

From there we headed for another burial ground, about 25 miles northwest near Marion.

This one, the Heard Cemetery, lacked the allure of Live Oak: no venerable trees, only secondary growth; no stone wall, no fence, no sign; it lay exposed, within gunshot range but easy to miss, along Alabama Highway 14. It was much smaller, with only a scattering of markers, and a single sizable headstone.

That marker was our goal; and despite lacking the amenities of the genteel Dixie death cult, the Heard graveyard enclosed what Chip and Andy most wanted to visit, the resting place of Jimmie Lee Jackson.

Here I knew a little something. I had been part of the funeral cortege which carried his coffin here from the church in town, behind his family and Dr. King, through the rain.

I knew about how his killer also got away with killing another young black man a year later, then walked free for more than four decades. And how Jackson’s family finally caught a brief glimpse of justice; heard a rumor of it, topped a thin, crumbled slice of it with the curdled margarine of old grief. The killer, an ex-state trooper, was 77 when he finally served five months in prison.

I had also visited the cemetery a year or two earlier, and could point out the dozen or so places where the granite had been nicked and gouged by bullets. It still stands, but within gunshot range is not hyperbole. (An earlier blog post on the shooting of Jackson is here.)

From there we soon wrapped up the interview, and I headed off to Montgomery.

I admit I soon mostly forgot about the podcast project; several other such interviews have wound up on disks or as transcripts on some obscure library shelves, waiting to enlighten, or bore, a stray grad student or two. In my own work, other such living “relics” have been of much use to me, though.

And more than a year later, the “White Lies” podcastwas done and out. And amid all the recorded palaver, I turn up for a cameo in Episode Five, describing — well, that’s enough of a spoiler. Andy and Chip uncovered history I knew nothing about in solving their cold case; let them tell you that part of the story. . . .

 

I had spent the rest of 1965 in Selma. Later I published four books drawing on my civil rights experiences. Three are still available.

Selma 1965, The march that changed the South

Eating Dr. King’s Dinner, A Memoir of the Movement

Uncertain Resurrection, The Poor Peoples Campaign, 1968

For a long time, I believed and recounted the Selma campaign as a historic tale with a happy ending. But its adversaries never gave up, and by 2014, with the U. S. Supreme Court’s Shelby County vs Holder decision, the happy ending was ripped away, and a widespread rollback of the advances the movement had achieved was underway.

Today, March 7 2025, marks  the 60th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” assault on the first, nonviolent attempt to cross the Pettus Bridge and begin the march to Montgomery. As local organizers in Selma launch their annual Jubilee of memorials, this history is under assault from many directions, including a deeply hostile administration in Washington.

Thus when I speak about it now, as an octogenarian veteran, I tell audiences that the struggle I and some others had naively thought was finished in 1965, has now flared back up in full force across the American landscape, under the banner of retribution with using new weapons and tactics to achieve old repressive goals.

In this growing crisis,  the Selma movement is a rich resource and example to learn from, rather than a blueprint to be repeated. And especially to younger readers and listers, my charge to you is stark: Study, plan, gird yourselves and then step up, because it is now YOUR TURN.