What I Saw in Selma

Sixty-one years after Bloody Sunday, the march continues

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our nation has been shaped by patriots who had a deep faith in the promise of the future and then turned that faith into action.

Take Reverend Jesse Jackson. Over the course of a decades-long career, he developed a vast network of partnerships and power. But he never hoarded it for himself, or let it sit as some idle thing. He shared it, having faith that his investment in regular people would deliver a grand return.

He shared it with the child in poverty. With the single mother. With the Black entrepreneur. With anybody who needed a champion.

In Chicago, Dawn and I attended a memorial for Reverend Jackson. We heard from ministers, civil rights leaders, grassroots champions, and former presidents. We listened to stories of courage and moral clarity that define Jackson’s towering legacy.

Jesse Jackson’s genius wasn’t just in how he used his platform to shine light on injustice through grand speeches and soaring rhetoric–it’s how he leveraged his power to help regular people, in ways big and small.

It’s easy to look at the state of our country and think, “Where are the Jesse Jacksons of this moment?”

You likely won’t find the answer in Washington, D.C. You need to look to the community.

It’s patriots like Pastor Otis Culliver. He is the Senior Pastor at the church where activists gathered over six decades ago to plan a strategy for civil disobedience in Selma. Today, Pastor Culliver honors that legacy by bringing faith and wisdom to the community.

It’s patriots like JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist. She’s the Executive Director of the Alabama ACLU, and the first Black woman to hold that position. She is on the front lines of defending voting rights, at a time when we have a White House that is actively trying to strip those rights away.

We still live in a nation of patriots. They rarely get the spotlight. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

So in a moment when we are seeing new attempts to disenfranchise voters, and restrict the voice of the people, and suppress democracy, and roll back the hard-fought freedoms that people like Rev. Jackson fought for, we must remember that we aren’t alone.

Right now, millions of Americans are channeling their faith in a better future into the work of making that future a reality. In coffee shops and courts. In schoolhouses and state houses. In churches and charities all across the country.

Everyone likes to talk about how powerful the president is. But we need to remember how powerful we, the people, are.

The critics will tell us to slow down our march. What they fail to understand is that we cannot–and will not–stop fighting for democracy.

In the spring of 1965, Annie Pearl Avery marched with John Lewis and hundreds of Civil Rights activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand voting rights for all. Protesters were beaten. Bloodied. Some were killed. Annie was twenty-three years old.

Today, Annie Pearl Avery is 84–the oldest living footsoldier of the march that bent history toward justice. I had the honor of standing by her side this past weekend, at the 61st Jubilee of Bloody Sunday.

Selma is where ordinary Americans like Annie did something extraordinarily American: They spoke truth to power.

They knew the consequences. They knew the risks. They understood the only certainty was pain, and success was far from guaranteed.

Still, they marched. Why? Because they knew that hope was worth fighting for, even if they may not see that hope realized in their own lifetimes.

It wasn’t some blind faith. It was a faith of action–the kind that I grew up learning about when I’d sit in the church pews on Sunday and say alongside the congregation:

“God didn’t bring me this far to leave me.”

So let’s keep the faith–and let’s keep up the work.

Elevate,
Wes