Dear Friends,
The
film Selma is now playing in our
local theaters. As the fiftieth anniversary of the march, March 7, approaches, this is a film worth seeing for
its historical content as well as for understanding the religious convictions
that under-girded the whole civil rights movement.
In the
film as in reality, John Lewis and Hosea Williams led the marchers up the left
side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Barely over the bridge, they were attacked and
beaten by the police and deputies. The world watched the brutality on television.
Two weeks later, the world watched again as the marchers, swelled in great
numbers by people of faith from all over the country, escorted by the national guard, crossed the bridge again and made it safely
to Montgomery, some fifty-five miles to the north.
Since
the march, a memorial has been built just to the left side of the bridge where
the attack on the marchers took place. I stood before it, awash in awe, in
2000, at the thirty-fifth anniversary march and was vastly moved by the
connection made between two events which took place in different parts of the
world some three thousand years apart. This simple monument - twelve pitched
stones in flowing water- was inspired by
the Book of Joshua where the crossing of the Jordan by the Israelites
into the Promised Land is described. There, the waters parted, “as the priests
carrying the ark of the covenant of the Lord remained motionless on dry ground
in the bed of the Jordan until the whole nation had completed the passage.” (
Joshua 3.17) Afterwards, one man from
each tribe of Israel was commissioned to go into the water and take up a stone
from the spot in the Jordan where the priests with the ark had been standing
motionless. At Gilgal, on the east side of Jericho, Joshua set up the twelve
stones that had been taken from the Jordan.
"In the future,” Joshua said, “when people ask you the
meaning of these stones,
you shall tell them,
Israel crossed the Jordan here. (Joshua 4.20-21.)”
President Lyndon Johnson passed
the Voting Rights Act some time later that year, 1965. It has stood as a living
record of the victory of the non- violent pursuit of human rights. Last year,
2014, the Supreme Court rejected the most substantial first part of that law,
leaving states to reframe the prerequisites for voting, largely in states in
the deep south.
Do we need another Selma? What will you and I do?
~Sister Joan Sobala
