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!