A Jefferson son - Eston Hemings - in Madison

As I was exploring Thomas Jefferson’s amazing home at Monticello earlier this month, I thought about the children he had with Sally Hemings. One of them – Eston - and his family are buried at Forest Hills cemetery in Madison.  Therein lies a fascinating story.

Sally Hemings was the enslaved woman who was essentially Jefferson’s mistress for almost four decades – from her time with him in Paris when she went there in 1787 as a 14-year-old to care for his younger daughter until his death in 1826. When they came back to the U.S. from Paris in 1789, she was pregnant – and she had negotiated with Jefferson that he would free any children they had once they reached the age of 21 or upon his death. 

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson had seven children, four of whom survived. Jefferson with his wife, Martha, also had six children, two of whom survived to adulthood. It was one of them who Sally accompanied to Paris. Martha died in 1782 – and was Sally’s half-sister – same white father, different mothers. The two were said to have a striking resemblance.

The youngest of their children was named Eston – named after Thomas Eston Randolph, a favorite Jefferson cousin. He was born at Monticello on May 21, 1808, near the end of Jefferson’s second term as president.

A replica of John and Pricilla
Hemming's cabin

When Eston was growing up at Monticello, he and his two brothers were put under the care of a skilled enslaved carpenter, John Hemmings, Sally’s brother (who spelled his last name with two m’s). Jefferson himself apparently had little to do with them. The third child, Madison Hemings, wrote of Jefferson in a memoir published in 1873, “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children. We were the only children of his by a slave woman. He was affectionate toward his white grandchildren.”

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed wrote that of the four children, Eston seemed to identify the most with Jefferson. “a near copy of Jefferson facially and physically in terms of height and build.”  Music was the passion of Eston’s soul, much as it was for Jefferson. He learned to play the piano and violin and later made his living as a musician. One of Jefferson’s favorite songs was “Money Musk”. (You can hear it on YouTube.) As an adult, Eston made that one of his signature tunes when he played for dances while he lived in Ohio.

When Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, Eston – who was then 19 - and his older brother Madison were freed. (The two older children, Beverly - a man’s name at that time - and Harriet, had been freed earlier when they turned 21 and in time moved to the Washington D.C. area.) When Sally left Monticello in 1826, she lived with Madison and Eston in nearby Charlottesville, later moving in with Madison and his family. 

In 1832, Eston married an 18-year old free woman of color, Julia Ann Isaacs. She was the daughter of the successful Jewish merchant, David Isaacs, from Germany, and Nancy West, a free woman of mixed race. Eston and Julia's first child, John, was born in 1835 and their second, Anna, was born in 1837, both in Charlottesville.

Sally died in 1835. Eston and Madison and their families in 1837 moved to Chillicothe, Ohio, to live in a free state. The third child of Eston and Julia - Beverly Frederick – was born there in 1839. As their children grew, they were educated in integrated schools. 

The house Eston built in Chillicothe

Eston earned a living in Chillicothe as a carpenter and a musician. He built a home for his family there. A local historian in Chillicothe, Beverly Gray, said in the movie Black Fiddlers, that Eston and his group were always sought after because, as one of the persons who attended the dance said, “When he struck up his violin, the only thing you could do was get up and dance.”  (You can find the section on Eston in the movie starting at about 46:30.)

People in Ohio seemed to understand that he was a child of Thomas Jefferson and commented on the resemblance when they saw pictures or statues of Jefferson. 

An artist's imagined image of Eston

A 1902 article in the Scioto Gazette, a Chillicothe newspaper, described Eston this way: 

He was “of a light bronze color, a little over six feet tall, well proportioned, very erect and dignified; his nearly straight hair showed a tint of auburn, and his face, indistinct suggestion of freckles. Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent, he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody's attention to him.”

But people there understood that his mother was of mixed race, as was his wife. That was a social gulf they could not cross. Also, after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Eston no longer felt it was safe to remain in southern Ohio, and so in 1852 he moved with his wife and three teen-aged children to Wisconsin. 

They all changed their last name to Jefferson and were light-skinned enough to identify as white. (Sally Hemings was three-quarters white. Her children with Thomas Jefferson were seven-eighths European in ancestry.)

They could start life over in a city that had the same name as his older brother – the brother who got that name at the suggestion of Dolley Madison, the wife of one of Thomas Jefferson’s best friends, James Madison.

Eston only lived for four years after coming to Madison. He was said he be demand as a cabinet maker, drawing on one of the skills he had learned from his uncle, John, and had perfected over the years. 

But he died on Jan. 3,1856 at the age of 47 and is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery. (This new gravestone incorporates the original. It was put up in the early 2020s  by a local group with the permission of Eston's descendants, according to an official at Forest Hill.

Julia was 41 when he died. She lived in Madison for 33 more years until her death on Jan. 1, 1889 at the age of 74. She, too, is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery.

Their children were ages 20, 18 and 16 when Eston died.

Anna died about a decade after Eston, on April 11, 1866, at the age of 29 in the Town of Burke just outside Madison. She had married Albert T. Pearson, a carpenter who was a captain during the Civil War.  They had three children and one of them - Walter Beverly Pearson - became a wealthy industrialist in Chicago, becoming president of the president of the Standard Screw Company.

Beverly and John outside a hotel they managed.

The oldest child, John Wayles Jefferson (John Wayles was Sally’s grandfather), went on to become a Union officer in the Civil War. Before the Civil War, John  Jefferson worked as the proprietor of the American House hotel in Madison. He brought on his younger brother Beverly to help and learn the business, which would play a role in Beverly’s life later.

In 1861, at the age of 26, John Jefferson enlisted in the Union Army and served in the 8th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. He rose quickly in the ranks, named major one month after enlisting, promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1863, and then to colonel in 1864. He was wounded twice – once during the Siege of Corinth in Mississippi in 1862 and then at the battle of Vicksburg, also in Mississippi, in 1863. He was promoted to commander of the entire 8th Wisconsin in 1864 and mustered out of service later that same year.

Both during and after the war, John Jefferson wrote as a newspaper correspondent, publishing articles about his experiences. After the war, he moved to Memphis, Tennessee,  where he became a highly successful cotton broker, founding the Continental Cotton Company. He also bred trotting horses on his plantation near Memphis. Articles under his name in the Memphis Daily Avalanche covered such matters as improving streets, enlarging the city's boundaries, and preventing cotton-warehouse fires. 

John Jefferson never married. He died on June 12, 1892, at the age of 57 and is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery.

Eston and Julia’s youngest son, Beverly Frederick, played the biggest role in Madison after the Civil War. Like his older brother, he also served as a solider in the Union Army during the war, part of Company E, 1st Wisconsin Infantry.

When he came back to Madison, he built on what he had learned about the hotel business a bit from brother John before the war. In 1864, he also married Anna Maud Smith, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1846. 

Beverly became the proprietor of the Capital Hotel (also known as the Vilas House), located on the eastern corner of Main Street and what is now Martin Luther King Blvd. (formerly Monona Avenue) where there is now a Starbucks. 

Historians described it as one of the finest hotels in the state. His obituary in 1908 described him as a “pioneer boniface” –a term for a jovial innkeeper.

Jefferson Transfer Company

In 1872, Beverly shifted to running the Jefferson Transfer Company - what became the leading firm in the city for using horse-drawn carriages to carry multiple passengers along a fixed route for a fare. Think of it as a precursor to Madison Metro. 

He was a member of Masons, GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) and the Old Settlers Club.

Anna died on died Feb. 5, 1882. They had five sons, one of whom apparently died in childhood. 

Some time after Anna’s death, Beverly moved into the Park Hotel on the Square and lived there for about 25 years before moving to his son Fred’s home in Chicago, where he died on Nov. 11, 1908 at age 69.

Beverly with three of his sons
 around 1900.

The headline in the Madison Democrat the next day read: “A likeable character at the Wisconsin capital and a familiar of statesman for half a century…True friend and genial citizen” 

But all those political leaders never knew of his connection to the third president of the United States.

The legacy of the Hemings/Jefferson family in Madison is only vaguely known. People are surprised to learn that a son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is buried here. 

And the story of their family is even less well known, even though their graves are all at Forest Hill. 

This family has touched Madison history in so many ways.

Further resources:
The Hemings of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed

Getting Word: African American Oral History Project – This project preserves the histories of Monticello’s enslaved families and their descendants. It is an initiative of the International Center for Jefferson Studies. This link is to the page on Eston Hemings.

Julia Jefferson Westerinen, great-great-great granddaughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson speaks on several videos about what she has learned. Her line of succession from Eston is through son Beverly, then his son Carl, then his son William, who was her father.

Family Search family trees for Eston and family 

 

Needing a place, finding a place

As Rev. (and Sen.) Raphael Warnock was winding up the service this morning at Ebenezer Baptist Churchin Atlanta he had done the classic church altar call and then walked into the crowd.

“In the days ahead, in what's coming our way , you’re going to need a place,” he told everyone. "You're going to need a foundation. You're going to need some reinforcements. That's what the Body of Christ is. We are one."

And here was a place indeed. In all the storms swirling through our nation and so many other nations, this sanctuary on this day offered energy and hope.

The eight of us from Christ Presbyterian Church in Madison could not have found a better place to end our week-long Civil Rights Pilgrimage. Across the street was the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s father was the long-time pastor and where MLK himself was an associate pastor while he led the Civil Rights movement.  

So we gathered in the packed sanctuary, sang hymns with the all-women choir (celebrating Women’s History Month), shared communion – and, of course, heard Rev. Warnock preach. (You can get a sample of one of the hymns here.)

He was using a section from Paul’s letter to the people of Rome, chapter 12, verses 1-5. It says in part, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God.”

And he called his sermon “They Not Like Us,” which brought laughter from the crowd. They recognized it from Kenrick Lamar’s half time show at the Super Bowl last month.

 “Thank you, Kendrick, for interrupting the regularly scheduled program,” Warnock said. The halftime performance perplexed some people who did not understand all the messages woven through it but delighted many Black folks who saw themselves portrayed in dramatic ways at a moment when powerful forces are trying to push them back.

Warnock noted that Lamar had used a line from the poem by Gil Scott Heron: “The revolution will not be televised.” And then noted how Lamar had flipped it: “The revolution ‘bout to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy,” he said standing on top of a car.

He called the whole performance “a modern day spiritual,” tucking bold messages within a familiar art form. 

“All that at the halftime at the Super Bowl and all you wanted was your beer and pretzels,” a smiling Warnock said.

And then he tied it all to the story of Jesus. 

Jesus was lynched on a cross, he said. “Like so many brown brothers, he died with his hands up.” But then three days later, “he got off that cross and into our hearts.”

Followers of Jesus are called to be different, Warnock preached. “We are the body of Christ. We are not called to go along to get along. We are the righteous resistance.”

Too often, he said, the church has conformed – to the Roman Empire of Constantine, to the slaveholders of the past and to the Jim Crow laws of Reconstruction, to Nazi Germany and to South African apartheid. 

So, he asked, “What does it mean to be transformed to be the body of Christ?”

First, love radically – love one another with mutual affection, as Paul wrote later in that letter to the people of Rome. Outdo one another in showing honor.

“What would the church, the world be like if we were outdoing love for each other,” he asked.

Second, serve joyfully. 

And then walk victoriously. 

“My beloved,” Warnock said, “I know it’s tough. Everywhere I go, they ask ‘what are we going to do?’ “

His answer: “Walk like somebody who knows that he’s not given this world over to mere mortals…If you know Jesus walks with you, you can walk in victory.”

He cued up a video of Serena Williams doing the Crip Walk during the halftime show that was so controversial when she did it after winning the gold medal in tennis at the 2012 Olympics.

Despite all the backlash she received both times, Warnock said, “she just kept on moving, kept on walking.”

Serving joyfully, walking victoriously.

Finding a place to be.

We found that place. Now all – all – we have to do is love radically, serve joyfully and walk victoriously. 

May it be so.

You can find the whole worship service at this link.

 

Andrew Young remembers, inspires

It was 90 minutes of stories and insights from Andrew Young, a key aide to Martin Luther King, Jr., a member of Congress, an ambassador to the United Nations, a mayor of Atlanta, an elder in our nation who shared his life with our group of eight from Christ Presbyterian Church on a Saturday afternoon in downtown Atlanta.

His stories covered so much territory. And his thoughts for today – his worries and what gives him hope – left us all pondering how we might live.

First, a few stories. 

My favorite involved the time he and his wife, Jean, were in Thomasville, Georgia, where he was pastor of Bethany Congregational Church – and where he was encouraging people to register to vote. 

Jean, it turned out, grew up in the same town – Marion, Ala., and went to the same high school, as Coretta Scott King. Juanita Abernathy, the wife of one of King’s closest friends, Ralph, also went to that high school. Three powerful women with three of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

As they drove into Thomasville in the mid-1950s, Andrew and Jean saw the Ku Klux Klan out in full white-sheet regalia. “I thought there were a thousand of them,” Young said with a chuckle. “There probably were a hundred.” But however many there were, they were an intimidating sight.

Both Andrew and Jean had immersed themselves in the theology of non-violence. This, however, was an unnerving and frightening moment. Andrew figured he would go out from their house to talk to the leaders of the Klan. He asked Jean to stand in the window with a rifle and if they threatened him, he would tell the Klan that she had them in her sights. 

“I cannot do that,” Jean told him. “I can’t point a gun at the heart of a child of God.”

Andrew said he replied, “Did you ever see the heart of a Klansman?”

Jean wasted no time with her answer: “I don’t see much of your heart now.”

Lesson learned.

Andrew called the mayor of the town who told the major business leaders he did not want any trouble. They let the Klan protest downtown, but not in the Black community. Crisis averted.

Andrew Young said he put into practice what he knew – “Stop and think and pray and then do something sensible.”

This was Young’s trademark throughout his career – finding ways to connect people, to negotiate to reduce conflicts. It was all about relationship building for the common good.

He traced that back to his experiences growing up in New Orleans and to the advice of his father.

On the corner he had to pass by to go just about anywhere, he said, there was an Irish pub, an Italian bistro, a Chevrolet dealer and the Nazi offices, where he could hear their German shouts. “I had to be a negotiator to get to the grocery store,” he said.

And then his father told him that Young would never be a very tall man, “so you’re never going to be able to beat up anybody. So you better just stay calm and let your mind lead you through the troubles.” That turned out to be good advice all the way through, Young said, “even with my wife.”

He learned how to work to build networks before any troubles began. The National Council of Churches, where had been hired in 1957 to work with the Youth Division, sent him to Little Rock, Arkansas, that year to work with white students in churches in anticipation of the contentious integration of schools in that city.

Later, now working for King in Birmingham, Ala. In 1963, Young’s first task was to get to know the Black folks in the community and help determine what they wanted changed and he worked with the Episcopal bishop to bring together white business leaders to help them understand what the Black citizens wanted. 

There were troubles. The police set dogs and fire houses on young people who were protesting, white supremacists bombed the 16^th Street Baptist Church on a Sunday morning killed four little girls. But in the end – after a year – the white community agreed to make changes. “Birmingham desegregated before any other city in the South,” Young said.

Two stories from when he was elected mayor of Atlanta in 1981. 

The Friday after his election, he met with 85 CEOs. He acknowledged that most of them had not supported him, but that he would need their help to lead the city. He gave them his home phone number and told them to call him when they thought he was doing something stupid and also when they had ideas on how to make the city better.

Then one Saturday morning, Young was enjoying the chance to sleep in. But his phone rang and one of his aides set “Get your ass out of bed.” No way, Young said and hung up. But the aide called back and talked to Jean and she told him to get up.

The wife of Tom Murphy, the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives had died and her funeral was that day a little more than an hour west of Atlanta. Young described Murphy as the most powerful politician in Georgia. So Young got up and drove to the church, feeling awkward when he arrived. This was not his normal crowd. He decided to stay inconspicuous in the back.

When Murphy spotted him, he went to the back of the church and led Young to the front row, telling two ardent segregationists – former Gov. Lester Maddox and former U.S. Sen. Herman Talmadge to “move over and make room for the mayor of Atlanta.” 

Young noted that after that, he never had any trouble getting Murphy to push through legislation that would help Atlanta.

Relationship building for the common good.

But today’s political environment is very different. “There’s just too much going on to process it,” he said of the first weeks of the Trump Administration. 

“I want to say ‘How can this do some good?’ and I can’t see how much good can come from this.”

But he still clings to hope, based on a lifetime of tackling issues that seemed impossible and then seeing change happen, recognizing that he did not often know what he would be doing the next day and sensing that God’s Spirit had brought him where he needed to be.

What to do now? 

Vote, was his one-word answer.

And then take hope in one of his favorite Gospel hymns – “I don’t feel no ways tired.” Here are the lyrics and a link to a contemporary group singing it.

I don't feel no ways tired
I've come too far from where I started from
Nobody told me that the road would be easy
I don't believe He brought me this far to leave me.

A day of contrasts

It’s the last day of Black History Month. And it was a day when we were immersed in Black history in very emotional ways. And just a note – end of Black History Month does not mean it’s time to stop talking about or studying Black history.

First stop – the new Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. You can see the Alabama River down the hill, you can see the trees starting to flower, you can hear the cardinals singing. It is a sharp contrast of what we see in the park.

This is designed to honor the lives of the 10 million people who were enslaved in this country. There are some 50 sculptures that take visitors from the presence of the indigenous tribes in the Montgomery and the richness of their culture through the inspiring stories of the people of Africa before the slave trade began, then through the life of the enslaved people in this county. That is not a pretty story. There is a solemnity as people walk through the park. More on all of this below.

Then we went to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice that makes vivid the lynchings that occurred between 1877 and 1950. Somber, for sure. But also, as we arrived, we could see the building housing the hanging concrete slabs through blossoming dogwood trees and then we turned to see statues of terrified enslaved people. More contrasts.

Strength and determination. Oppression and subjugation. A wall celebrating the names of the many enslaved people who lived in obscurity. An area set aside to honor Ida B. Wells who reported on the many lynchings of the time she lived. And a wall of gently falling water soothing the shattered spirits.

The Sculpture park is built along the river where enslaved people were brought to Montgomery for sale and on the other side is one of the railroad lines build by enslaved people in the 1800s so day by day, slaves could be packed into box cars and brought to Montgomery. 

In a reversal of the story, it was the “Underground Railroad” that helped enslaved people escape to freedom. That is represented by a stunning statue of Harriet Tubman outside the visitor center.

There are so many beautiful sculptures and distressing stories here. One that touched me deeply was a young girl clinging to her mother as they awaited the potential celebration that came with the slave auctions. 

And then there were the stories of resistance. There were many forms of resistance, but the words that caught my attention have relevance to our time as well: “The most radical form of resistance was survival and refusing to give away the capacity to love.”

At the end, we came to the National Monument to Freedom – the names of so many formerly enslaved people now celebrate on a huge wall with pillars that say “Perseverance. Hope, Strength and Faith” in front of the wall and a family looking at the wall. Visitors are invited to put carnations in the water at the base of the ball. 

This did not wash away all the pain we had witnessed as we walked through the garden. But it did offer a balm and became an act of honor and hope.

At the National Memorial, we walked below the more than 800 corten steel slabs hanging from the ceiling, one for each county where Black people were lynched – some 4,400 that have been documented so far. The closest ones to Madison were in Duluth, Minnesota in 1920. But many of them were from the states of the Confederacy that tried to re-establish white supremacy after the emancipation of the slaves.

As we drove toward Atlanta for the last two days on this trip, our group from Christ Presbyterian Church reflected on the images and the feelings of this day. And I held tight to the words on that National Monument to Freedom:

Kidnapped, Traffic, Enslaved, and Abused

Enduring the horrors and pain of slavery,
You still found the capacity to love,
to dream, to nurture new life, and to triumph.

We honor your strength.
We honor your perseverance in the midst of sorrow.
We honor your struggle for freedom.

Your children love you.
The country you build must honor you.
We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement.
We commit to advancing freedom in your name.

 

 

A legacy leads to the present moment

We entered the Legacy Museum in Montgomery as if riding in on the giant waves projected on the screen in front of us, words telling us about the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. That stretched from 1501 to 1867, kidnapping nearly 13 million Africans, loading them on ships for the perilous, often fatal trips across the ocean to the Americas – South and North.

We saw the role the slave trade played in the North as well as the South, the conditions of enslavement, the hopes and crushing disappointment of the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, complete with lynching after lynching. We saw the growth of the Civil Rights movement with new freedoms and new possibilities and the growth of mass incarceration that once again treated Black citizens as disposable in so many parts of our society.

It was a sobering day for the eight of us from Christ Presbyterian Church. And there were moments that stood out for me during the four hours we spent absorbing so many stories in the museum.

Here’s a number that startled me. In New York City in 1730, about 50% of New York residents owned slaves. It was one fact about the role the slave trade played in the New England and East Coast states, creating enormous wealth while providing some of the workers who physically created the cities we know there.

On the very site where this museum now stands was one of the slave warehouses in Montgomery, a city that between 1820 and 1860 was one of the most active human trafficking sites in the nation. In 1860, two thirds of the population of Montgomery was made up of enslaved Black people.

One of the hardest things to experience here was the separation of families in the selling of slaves, parents take from children, children separated from siblings. There is a powerful movie portraying one family’s separation that is just heart wrenching. There is a hologram of two children in a slave pen calling out plaintively, “Mother…mother.”

The domestic slave trade from 1783 to 1861 violently separated nearly half of all Black families in the U.S. 

And this is not just an issue in the past. The way the U.S. immigration policy works now will bring more family separations, not for slavery but through deportation.

States each had their own unique way of dealing the realities of enslaved people and Black people in general. Here is Alabama, the Legislature passed a law in 1833 that banned freed Black people from living anywhere in the state. The only way a Black person could be in Alabama is if they were enslaved.

Alabama, like so many other states also banned Black and white marriage or cohabitation from 1852 until 2000 (although the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1967 decision ruled all bans on interracial marriages unconstitutional). The day before this visit, when we were at Holt Street Baptist Church, the man who greeted us was telling us about his two Black children’s marriages to white people. A century ago, they could have been lynched for doing that.

And speaking of lynchings, that particular horror gets much attention in this museum, which is connected to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which remembers and honors the more than 4,400 Black people who were lynched between 1877 and 1950. We will be visiting that on Friday.

In the museum are jars - so many jars - of dirt gathered from the lynching sites in many counties all over the country. It is a place to stop and ponder and remember.

One of my journalistic heroes is Ida B. Wells, who reported in detail about the lynchings through the nation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In a quote on a wall from her, she describes how lynchings, once used as rough justice for white criminals, became racialized acts of terror. In the first decade of the 20^th century, she reported, there were 959 known lynchings – 102 of white people, 857 of Black people.

And then the museum took us into the prisons of today, with the disproportionate share of Black people imprisoned, where children wind up spending the rest of their lives behind bars, where capital punishment is much more likely to be inflicted on Black people and where prison conditions are too often wretched. One person noted that where once people in white robes (the KKK) kept Blacks in subjugation, now it is people in black robes (the judges).

This shifted to a very human scale when you could sit in front of a glassed-in space, pick up a phone and hear a prisoner on video tell you a bit of their story.

This all, of course, was pretty depressing. But there were moments of victory, when justice overcame oppression and inhumanity. And there was that sense of resilience that sustained people then and that we need now.

One exhibit has people held in slave pens speaking as holograms out of their very confined space. One woman stood there holding her Bible, tell the story of a friend whose five children were taken from her, of the agony, the despair – and her prayers. When the boat taking her children to their new owner went aground, the children were returned to her. 

“Everybody got to have faith,” the woman holding the Bible said. “This trouble won’t last for always.”

Standing in the midst of history, looking forward

We stood on the porch where a bomb went off late at night January 30, 1956 at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, as the bus boycott in that city was in its second month.

We stood in the kitchen where King three nights earlier sat with a cup of coffee late at night after a vitriolic threatening phone call, where he sat and sensed God’s presence with him in his quest for justice.

We sat in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where King arrived in 1954 as a young pastor to serve a congregation with a deep heritage of activism. Just over a year later, he was propelled into a leadership position in the bus boycott.

We sat in the sanctuary of Holt Street Baptist Church and listened to the recording of King giving the powerful speech on the night of Dec. 5, 1955 when 5,000 people came together to vote to continue what had been a one-day boycott of the Montgomery buses until the bus company agreed to treat black passengers with dignity. That boycott lasted 382 days until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional.

We stood in the room at the Civil Rights Memorial Center where powerful videos and many plaques marked so many who died in the struggle for civil rights and then walked into the hallway calling on a new generation to “fight today for a better tomorrow.” And we signed a commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion for all.

Each stop on this day of the Civil Rights pilgrimage for eight of us from Christ Presbyterian Church in Madison provided a connection to the past and a window to what could be in the future. Each one reminded us of the risks and the possibilities that generations past embraced and challenged us to think of ways to indeed keep the quest for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion alive for our time in the midst of all the current headwinds.

A few other things that struck me and others from the day:

The history of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church beyond King’s role is fascinating. It was originally organized in 1877 a place that had been a slave-trader’s pen – the place where slaves were kept until they were brought to one of Montgomery’s four slave-auction warehouses to be sold. 

Then the congregation bought the current lot two blocks from the Alabama Capitol in 1879, despite the objections of some white residents that they did not want a black church so close to the seat of government – a government committed to white supremacy.

Our guide at Dexter, Nikki Davis, told us that in the early 1900s, the church got the first pipe organ of any black church in Montgomery – but it had no one who could play the organ. 

A teen who could play the piano was connected to the organist at a white Baptist church and the two of them met under the cover of darkness so she could learn to play. And play she did – into her 90s.

Wanda Anderson, part of the Dexter Tourism Ministry who greeted us at the parsonage, knew King’s oldest daughter when they were children. Later, she was at Dexter in 1967 when King came back to preach at the church’s centennial. While they gathered inside the church, the KKK marched outside in full regalia. 

Nikki Davis told us that in the midst of current efforts to roll back black history and diminish the rights of so many, “We continue to do the things we are called to do.” That includes building a summer curriculum for youth on black history to fill the week that is normally vacation Bible school, taking older youths on field trips to places like Birmingham to learn about that part of the civil rights struggle, welcoming fourth graders from all over the state as part of their Alabama history lesson. 

And then at Holt Street Baptist Church, we heard about the role in played in the bus boycott – “We were the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement,” retired pastor Rev. Willie D. McClung told us. And we heard about the backlash in the early 1970s when an anti-black state official designed new routes for interstates that surrounded and cut off the church from the neighborhood – and destroying much of the neighborhood in the process. But the church is now visible form one of those interstates, there is a large sign making its importance known and the new museum is becoming another destination on the Civil Rights Trail. 

The fight for a better tomorrow goes on.

A (very young) foot soldier’s Selma story

Thelma Dianne Harris was 15 years old when she joined the voting rights march on the bridge in Selma 60 years ago next week. She and her 13-year-old brother were at the very back of the group that was violently confronted by police and vigilantes.

As she told her story in Selma to the group of eight of us from Christ Presbyterian Church on this Civil Rights pilgrimage, the heroism, determination and pain of those days poured forth in her stories and in the example of her life.

For me, this day added a much wider and deeper context to the events of 1965 that transfixed the nation and transformed the laws guaranteeing the right to vote. I thought I knew the story. 

John Lewis and Hosea Williams led voting rights marchers the two-tenths of a mile across the Edmund Pettis Bridge that spans the Alabama River. When the law enforcement contingent attacked them, they gave Lewis a concussion and injured many others. The day – March 8, 1965 - is remembered as Bloody Sunday. 

About two weeks later, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led marchers from all over the nation across the bridge and they walked all the way to Montgomery for voting rights. And by August, Congress had passed and President Lyndon Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act. 

Yes, but there is so much more to the story. There were people gunned down – Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young black man who lived near Selma, and Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit killed by the KKK during the march to Montgomery. There was a white Unitarian Universalist minister beaten to death in Selma – James Reeb. And there was the fear that blacks in Selma felt as they sought to claim their rights as American citizens.

Dianne and her brother were students at a Missouri Synod school in Selma Alabama Lutheran Academy and Junior College. Her mother worked in oppressive and humiliating conditions in a cigar factory. (“They treated the tobacco leaves better than they treated their workers,” Dianne said.) One day, a student from another high school in town came over and asked Dianne and other students to join their voting rights protests. She, her brother and her classmates went to their first session on how to protest – skipping school in the process. They began to learn freedom songs.

She wanted to make it possible for her mother to vote, Dianne said, and she knew her mother would lose her job if she got involved in any protests. So even though her mother was unhappy that her kids were skipping school, she gave them permission to keep going to the training over the rest of the week.

Dianne is third from left.

By early February, Dianne was part of regular protests as people walked from Brown Chapel several blocks to the courthouse pushing for the right to vote. The youngsters carried signs that said, “Let our parents vote.” Sheriff Jim Clark, a staunch segregationist, began ordering arrests. Dianne was arrested twice and told of the terror of being kept in jail-like conditions overnight each time. She is now delighted to wear a button a student from Chicago made for her recently: “Proud jailbird of ‘65.”

Dianne explained that they were getting support from white people outside of Selma. A Lutheran pastor from Birmingham, Rev. Joseph Ellwanger, brought 70 white people organized as the White Concerned Citizens group to join in the protests. Years earlier, Ellwanger’s father had been president of the school that Dianne attended. Ellwanger has lived in Milwaukee since 1967, where he has been a very active leader in the civil and human rights efforts. 

Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot by a state trooper as he tried to protect his mother in nearby Marion and died eight days later on Feb. 26 in a hospital in Selma. One of the representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rev. James Bevel, told a crowd at Brown Chapel that he wanted to march to Montgomery with Jackson’s body and put it on the Capitol steps for Gov. George Wallace to see. But he knew that King would not approve of that, so he said he would just march by himself and invited others to join.

About a week later, people were marching across the bridge. There were years of frustration and weeks of preparation that preceded that.

So from sometime in January until March 8, people in Selma were marching to the courthouse, learning how to protest and getting ready for these pivotal moments in the nation’s history.

Dianne and her brother took a place at the back of the march (she had promised her mother they would not be in this march, but …). They never made it onto the bridge before the crowd turned and ran towards them, seeking shelter from the advancing police and men on horses with billy clubs and cattle prods. 

They ran from the bridge down the seven blocks to Brown Chapel, stopping to try to help an older woman who was struggling to walk as the men on horses were charging down the street. She told Dianne and her brother to keep running, that she could go no further. As they ran, they saw a man on a horse beat her to the ground.

Brown Chapel

Then as they approached Brown Chapel, a man on horse closed in on them, riding his horse right up the steps of the church, but they made it inside and hid under a pew.

That was just a glimpse of the terror so many experienced that day. But the story was not over. The nation reacted in horror to what they saw on television. People came from all over the country.

Dianne rode a bus to Montgomery and stayed with other young people at St. Jude’s school the night before the final rally at the Capitol. The school was run by Sinsinawa Dominicans from Wisconsin. And there was a major music event there for all the marchers – and for Dianne and her friends. Eartha Kitt, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tony Bennett, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Harry Belafonte and many more all performed for the crowd. 

And then the next day, March 25, Dianne joined 25,000 people in front of the Capitol and heard King close his speech with a repeated refrain – “How long? Not long!” 

It seems like a wonderful conclusion to a painful episode, but the struggle was hardly over. At the Lowndes Interpretive Center run by the National Park Service, ranger John Biechel, who grew up in Sheboygan, told us why the center was at this spot between Selma and Montgomery.

Yes, the march went along this route. But nearby was the tent city that blacks moved to when white landowners drove tenant farmers off their land if they registered to vote. Biechel told us that in 1965, when the Voting Rights Act passed, the number of blacks in Lowndes County where the center is totaled zero. There was still a high hill to climb, but those who registered were willing to risk job and home to have a say in the future of their community and their country.

And we heard Dianne voice her worry about what is happening in the nation now, the retreats from voting rights, the efforts to block out this history of racial injustice, the resurgence of people committed to white supremacy. 

As we gathered Tuesday evening back in our house for the week in Montgomery, the eight of us talked about the challenges we face to be true to our beliefs in the onslaught of regressive policies. And we made King’s refrain our own in our prayers for the evening – How long? Not long!