Just who was Edmund Pettus? According to Wikipedia, “Edmund Winston Pettus (born July 6, 1821 – July 27, 1907) was an American politician who represented Alabama in the United States Senate from 1897 to 1907. He previously served as a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded infantry in the Western Theater of the American Civil War . And from the Smithsonian, “ Pettus served as chairman of the state delegation to the Democratic National Convention for more than two decades, and was Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan during the final year of Reconstruction.”
In future years Pettus will doubtless be no more than a forgotten footnote, as it wasn’t Pettus that took center stage in our history. It was the bridge.
Fifty-five years ago John Lewis and Martin Luther King set off across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, headed for Montgomery, Alabama. Beside them hundreds of white and black freedom marchers joined hands only to be met by Alabama State troopers on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
I never intended my blog to be a history lesson. However, I have learned a bit of history about the Edmund Pettus bridge firsthand. In 2017 Jadyne and I followed the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir and the Oakland interfaith Gospel Choir on a Red State tour, an attempt to meet, talk to, and entertain people that we otherwise would never meet, people who held widely different views.
In Selma, we massed at the Brown Chapel where King, Lewis, and the other marches had gathered more than fifty years earlier before heading out on the freedom march. We joined both choirs singing “We Shall Overcome” an extraordinary moment.
Below are three minutes of two wonderful choirs joining in on “We Shall Overcome”
We left the chapel and gathered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We were joined by two of the original marchers, a gentleman whose name is unknown to me, and Linda Lowery, the youngest of the original marchers, the author of the book Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom.
Jadyne and Linda. Linda pulled back her hair over her left eye to reveal the scars left by the batons of the Alabama State Troopers.
The unknown marcher.
And we, too, shut down the bridge. Only this was 2017, not 1965, and the Alabama State Troopers were only present for traffic control. And there were hundreds of us, just as there were in 1965. This time the bridge was not shut down by freedom marchers, but by hundreds of gay and lesbian activists, each of whom was as active in pursuing freedom three years ago as the freedom marchers were in 1965.
