“We Make the Road by Walking” With the People

Abstract

We two mothers, one black and the other white, leaned forward in the pew to hear the words of our teenagers, Dara and Michael, as they stood at the pulpit to describe the experience that had the most personal meaning to them on the Civil Rights Tour from which they had just returned. The congregation strained to hear the stories they and 13 other young people told of walking the streets of Montgomery, Ala. It was there, in 1956, that Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led a bus boycott to usher in a non-violent movement that changed the world. Our children told of standing before the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery with water cascading over its marble rim and the words from the book of Amos, “Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Ala., 2003 (Photograph by Dara Satterfield.) Speaker after speaker, unable to limit the most meaningful memory to just one site they had visited, described walking together across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where 600 people in 1965 persevered through Bloody Sunday and continued the march to Montgomery to resist unjust voting practices. That was an experience with such profound depth that it defied words, they said, but would forever affect their lives. At the close of the church service, young people, church members, other parents, and the two of us, with glistening eyes threatening to spill, joined in …