2005 Civil Rights Journey. Selma. Tuesday evening, July 12.

Unsung heroes

Our appreciation for the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement grows at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma. It's a tender, homegrown museum that exists because of the efforts and pride of community volunteers. Our tour guide advises us not to touch anything -- not because the items have monetary value, but because they might fall and hit someone in the head. Every minute or so he towels himself off in the afternoon heat. Half of us slump to the floor as we let his words take us back to the cauldron that was Selma, 1965.

In a glass case in the lone air-conditioned room is an exhibit that looks like it'd be more comfortable in a natural history museum. I walk closer and see plaster molds . . . of footprints. Our guide explains. People who walked in one of the three Selma-to-Montgomery marches (only the final, historic march with an estimated 25,000 people was allowed to reach its destination) can walk in today take their shoes off, sit a spell, and have a cast made.

I think of the fears these marchers-turned-curators had to confront when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed them back in 1965:

"I know not what lies ahead of us. There may be beatings, jailings, tear gas. But I would rather die on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience! There is nothing more tragic in all this world than to know right and not to do it."

The individuals who labored behind the scenes have their legacies preserved, too. At the museum's entrance is a wall dense with note cards, each one a handwritten, personal account of that person's offering -- as cook, as comforter, as chauffer.

One of our youth leaders alerts us to a memorial for Viola Liuzzo, the 39-year-old white Unitarian Universalist mother of five who was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members while driving back to Montgomery after the third march. She came all the way down from Detroit, Mich. Two electric candles border her photograph. Some in our group take time to write in the journals we provided on the first day. We observe other memorials to those who practiced nonviolence to the very end.

If there's any doubt that this is a museum that celebrates the unsung over the famous, I spy a lopsidedly hung photo of then-President Bill Clinton visiting the museum. But no one else notices the photo -- it's tucked away in a spot few are likely to see -- and it goes unremarked.

The last meal of Rev. James Reeb


That evening, we dine over rich Southern food in a Selma restaurant famous because of another Unitarian Universalist martyr. Walker's Cafe was the site of the last meal of Rev. James Reeb, a father of four from Boston who heeded King's call to Selma. As Reeb and two other Unitarian ministers, all wide-eyed visitors to a dangerous land, left the restaurant, four white supremacists tracked them. In an ambush, Reeb was clubbed from behind and died; the other two ministers were taunted and beaten yet lived.

As with so much else on this journey, we tend toward silence as we take in these stories. Later, in small groups, we listen to each other share our personal reactions.

Entering a wilderness

Rev. Marti Keller, our trip chaplain, had put us on notice that we would be entering a wilderness, and we have, in every sense of the word. At this late hour, after 10 p.m., it's the physical wilderness that worries us.

The journey's participants, after an emotional day, are at rest in a motel. Rev. Marti sits in our rented van, along with UUSC staff members Kim McDonald and Anna Bartlett, as the four of us drive through the humid Alabama night. Fifteen minutes ago, I had asked for directions to the nearest grocery store. But we haven't seen a hint of civilization in at least ten minutes, save for the road itself, a narrow 2-lane blacktop with deep ditches at each side and utter darkness beyond. We haven't seen another car this whole time. An eeriness we all sense halts our conversation. The gas gauge is on "E." I twist the AM dial and find a Dick Clark Five song that comes in staticky and hard to hear over the cicadas.

We're all thinking the same thing. We can't help it. The night is suddenly fraught with imagined dangers. It's 1965 again -- lurking in cars unseen to us are policemen-by-day, Klansmen-by-night. I think of the activists who arrived in Alabama, up to their ears in good intentions but unprotected and vulnerable. I think back to the last moments of Viola Liuzzo as the headlights from behind whited out her rearview mirror just before her car was bumped for the first time.

Rev. Marti breaks the silence and recommends that we turn around. I know I shouldn't do this, but I look into the rearview mirror and let fly a fib: "Oh, my. We're getting pulled over and I'm not even speeding. I swear I'm not speeding." All three of them in the van declare "No!" and whip their heads around.

It takes a moment for them not to be mad at me. We turn around, back to Selma, and decide that next year's journey needs a nighttime drive into the wilderness.