One More Bridge to Cross
1965, 1978, 2008 & 2025 -- Four Powerful Segments of United States History and the Lessons We Can Learn From Them.
Selma, Alabama, 1965.
600 or so Americans attempt to engage in an act of nonviolent resistance. Their goal? Cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and walk 64 miles to Montgomery, the state capitol. It was an action prompted by ever-escalating persecution at the hands of government authorities; increasingly brutal attempts to put the Negroes “back in their place”.
Those attacks culminated in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a church deacon, killed by in-uniform Alabama State Trooper James Fowler. Law enforcement had been called up to quash a small group that included Jimmie and his mother. Their crime? Simply encouraging African Americans to register to vote.
Now, keep in mind that this was before the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law racial supremacists were intent on preventing. Which is why what happened next is so ironic. Their ever-escalating violent attempts to quash equality and the sheer barbarity of racial supremacy on display would only prove why such a law was necessary.
That first, tiny group was set upon, beaten with batons, and Jimmie himself, who’d flung his body on top of his mom to shield her from the blows, was shot, execution-style. Supremacists thought they’d won, that it was all over. They were wrong. These activists were just getting started.
With Jimmie’s murder, the goal of the fledgling movement shifted. It was no longer about just Selma. It was about the whole system, about taking the fight right to the governor’s mansion in Montgomery where Democrat George Wallace, the same person who declared, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” was two years into his first term.
Wallace declared the march illegal, and marchers, met by a massive contingent of troopers on horseback and wielding whips, and by deputized Klansmen carrying guns and clubs, were attacked and brutally beaten on what came to be known all around the world as Bloody Sunday. Blocked from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge and essentially trapped in Selma, Martin put out the call to all Americans, people of conscience, to get off the sidelines and join the struggle. And they did, thousands strong.
People from across the nation, of every ethnicity and ancestry, every age and every political affiliation, every gender, sexuality and philosophy converged on a city many of them had never even heard of until then. That’s because something clicked for them. We Americans grasped that though this seemed to be about a tiny group of Negroes in a southern town, it was really about something else entirely. It was about us as a nation and the saving of our collective soul. And in that moment, deep humanitarian activism, the same torch that stoked the fires that led to slavery’s end a century earlier was reignited. And it spread like wildfire.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Selma struggle. As we recount the story, we must remember how it really was, how the governor, the state’s politicians, most of its judges and the entire law enforcement structure were aligned against them. We must remember that this was an America with nearly twice as many KKK members as there were African Americans alive and that those Klansmen were committed to resisting, as Senator Richard Russell put it, “social equality” “to the bitter end” – no matter how far they had to go.
We must remember those who lost their lives to this cause, including James Reeb, Unitarian minister and personal friend of Martin’s who was beaten to death by an angry mob who saw him, simply for daring to show up there in that place at that time as a “traitor to his white brothers”.
We must remember Jonathan Daniels, a 26-year-old Euro American and Episcopal seminarian who selflessly used his body to shield Ruby Sales, a 17-year-old African American fellow marcher from a shotgun blast, and Viola Liuzzo, who was killed simply for being a white-presenting woman ferrying activists back to the airport after the march. And, of course, Jimmie, whose murder started it all. We must remember the hundreds of people who suffered grievous injuries at the hands of sanctioned authorities, who lost jobs and homes, and who were arrested, vilified and socially exiled.
But, more than anything, we must remember this group’s indomitable fortitude. How they refused to yield or to cower, to turn back or give in. How, by fortifying their conviction and setting their resolve, they conferred dignity upon themselves, and consequently, upon the rest of America. And, how they inspired us to become a different quality of people, one where “one nation, indivisible” isn’t just part of the pledge we recite but is how we live. No matter what, they refused to stop – until Selma’s Edmund Pettus was just another bridge they’d crossed.
Birmingham, Alabama, 1978.
I was 13 years old when I opted to speak in historically white churches on behalf of Richard Arrington who was vying to become Birmingham’s first African American mayor at a time when memories of fire hoses and police dogs turned on marchers, including children, were still fresh. My mother, who was arrested along with Martin and hundreds of others, was one of those children. It just so happens that she was also 13 at the time.
And she wasn’t alone. My aunt and uncle marched. My grandmother organized food deliveries for those who’d been arrested and who were being held in open-air cattle stockades at the Alabama State Fairgrounds, and my grandfather was one of the ministers who appealed to Martin to come to Birmingham in the first place. Their crime? Marching from 16th Street Baptist Church downtown while singing spirituals. Fast-forward 15 years, and we were a city needing to come to terms with our past if we were to have a future.
Arrington wasn’t the only one running. There were at least two other candidates, one promoting white supremacy and one preaching black nationalism. But even back then, I could see how both were reflections of each other, flip sides of the same factionist coin and that our only viable future was one that embraced all of us. So, I took it upon myself to help take Arrington’s message, a vision of a Birmingham for all Birminghamians to people who probably otherwise wouldn’t hear it.
It was Sister Rose, an Anglo, beehive-wearing, sweetheart of a woman, who talked me into visiting many of the city’s largest Southern Baptist churches, which, at that time, meant “segregated and white”, and speaking to them on Arrington’s behalf. She called the churches, booked me, drove me and introduced me, usually saying, “Have I got a treat for y’all this mornin’!” At every church, I was warmly received, and all my Arrington pamphlets, taken.
Richard Arrington went on to win the election, and in doing so, he made history. But, in many ways, his victory, historic as it was, is almost beside the point. The real point is that he achieved this at a time when African Americans were still a minority in Birmingham, which meant that the only way he could have won was with support that extended far beyond the African American community. More than a quarter of Birmingham’s white-identifying population had also voted for him.
As for me, having been born between the Birmingham Campaign and the Selma march, and having grown up hearing stories from family members about the changes they’d seen, I thought I understood it. But seeing it myself? That was something else altogether. Once the polls had closed and the votes for mayor had been tallied, it became clear that my hometown had done something remarkable; we’d set our sights on the future, choosing, in that moment, the kind of Birmingham we wanted to be. And in doing so, we’d crossed our own Edmund Pettus Bridge.
United States, 2008.
Three decades later, I was bringing the same lessons people in my hometown had taught me to an equally historic campaign – Barack Obama’s first presidential run. My contributions weren’t all that different from those days in Birmingham, except this time, I was galvanizing pastors across the entire nation instead of congregations in just one city. But the work was essentially the same.
Growing up, everything from the activism of my family to a city full of people who saw an unprecedented election as a chance to rewrite our shared story taught me an invaluable lesson – that the kind of America we’ll ultimately be is the same one each of us, by the sum total of our individual actions (or, by our inaction), on any given day, are choosing. That, we all have a powerful say in our becoming.
Then, there was my vocation. By 2008, I’d long since graduated from a Southern Baptist divinity school, had served as an adjunct seminary professor and, as a young, upcoming minister in a mostly white-identifying denomination, I saw, with my own eyes, how quickly racialization spread, as churches shifted from a deep, heart-centered commitment to social justice and making amends to signing up for the culture war and vowing to “take America back”.
From Martin’s sermons, on one hand, and the priests, rabbis, nuns and pastors who descended on Selma to preachers with Klan robes in their closets on the other, and televangelists yelling, “Thank God for AIDS”, I came to recognize something important about religion; that it’s a social technology, one that can be used to unite us or divide us, to strengthen or weaken us, make us or break us. My vision was to help us use that power for the former instead of the latter. That meant doing three things:
1. Helping the Obama campaign put out the call to all of America, including faith communities, just as Martin did in Selma,
2. Reaching out to historically white congregations just like I did in Birmingham, helping them set their sights on the future, choosing, in that moment, the kind of America we wanted to be, and
3. Empowering ethnic, lower-income and LGBTQ+ Americans to grasp the tremendous power of the vote that activists in Selma sacrificed so much to win for us, and imploring them to use that power.
That commitment, one inherited from those who did the marching long before me, is still what drives me today. In 2008, Obama, with his message of an America for all Americans, would become our 44th president. And in doing so, we’d cross yet another bridge.
United States, 2025.
All of which leads us here, to this profound moment in history. It’s hard to put into words all the conflicting elements as we approach what would have been Martin’s 96th birthday, were he still alive. I imagine him having celebrated Jimmie Carter’s 100th birthday with him and shared eloquently about his passing. I imagine him sounding the alarm about the dangerous direction in which America is headed. And I imagine him telling us that none of us are too old or too young to fight. But there are other points of significance to this particular year. It just so happened that Martin was born in January, which is also when the voter registration campaign in segregated Selma began. That was exactly 60 years ago this month.
And that’s not all. That arduous struggle would lead to the passage of the historic Voting Rights Act – also in 1965. This year marks the Act’s 60th anniversary. And that’s where it gets confounding. Because that same historic Voting Rights Act that was passed by a bipartisan Congress was later gutted by a religionized US Supreme Court. The very day they struck down those key protections, the states that had been the most egregious violators immediately set to work passing dressed-up versions of the same discriminatory statutes the Act was designed to prevent.
The Brennan Center for Social Justice reported that between January and July 2021, in the wake of the failed January 6 effort to overturn the election, 18 states made it harder for certain Americans to vote. And the people behind those laws were just getting started. Since the 2020 election, 30+ states have enacted restrictive voting laws. Those laws were already in effect in 29 states when we voted two months ago.
So, let that sink in.
Sixty years ago, Martin and so many others struggled relentlessly to get the Voting Rights Act passed. They succeeded. Then, a half-century later, a Supreme Court that’s abandoned its most sacred purpose – to protect the disadvantaged from the power-holders – essentially did the opposite of what it did during Brown v. Board and Lovings v. Virginia. It sided with the abusers. That one decision was a body blow to democracy, suppressing voter participation in certain districts, which tilted key battleground states in Trump’s favor. And that modest tilting allowed Trump, backed by the same militant Christians who tried to stop the ratification of votes that would name Biden president, to prevail against Kamala.
By obliterating the 1965 Voting Rights Act, whose 60th anniversary we should be celebrating as one of our nation’s greatest achievements this MLK Day, we’re instead witnessing Trump’s return to power with even fewer restraints than he had the last time, with a Supreme Court that’s essentially given him carte blanche to behave like an emperor, and an ideologically aligned majority in Congress. And this inauguration? This celebration of supremacy and religious imperialism and Make America Great Again-ism? It’s happening exactly on the day we’re celebrating Martin’s birthday and all he stood for. It’s as if Selma never happened.
That’s where we are. But, their trickery notwithstanding, we also have to own our part in this. Because, no amount of tinkering around the edges of democracy could have been successful if the 70 million Americans, a full third of our nation’s voting-age population, who didn’t exercise the vote others sacrificed to secure for us had actually voted. Because, if there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that Christian militants got out every single vote they possibly could, from Sunday school to nursing homes.
Poll after poll confirms that this nonvoting segment isn’t neutral or undecided. They overwhelmingly support progressive policies and candidates. So, if they’d gone to the polls, Kamala’s votes would have essentially doubled. This is exactly what televangelist Pat Robertson was counting on when, just two decades after Selma, he declared: “With the [voter] apathy that exists today, a well-organized minority can influence the selection of candidates to an astonishing degree." He knew they didn’t need to be a majority to game democracy. All they needed to do was feed the new majority’s apathy and get their dedicated minority organized. That’s been their playbook for 50 years.
With that, I think it’s important that we take a moment to imagine we were inaugurating Kamala this coming MLK Day, on this 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. To remember what it felt like to be an American in an America that had just elected Barack Obama. Do you remember how the whole world rejoiced with us for doing something so fundamentally good, and all that election said, not about Obama but about us? Now, imagine what Kamala’s election would have said to the world about the America we aspire to be. That’s what could have been, the road not taken. This is what we have.
Still, despite how crazy and tragic it is, there’s something about this inauguration/MLK Day visual that’s kind of perfect. Our souls need the imagery. We needed to see these two irreconcilable ideologies – Martin’s dream and Trump’s factionalism – one, trying to take America back and the other, forward, one, asserting their own supremacy and the other, affirming everyone’s dignity.
One group that’s willing to go as far as necessary to keep them from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The other, determined, come what may, to cross it. We needed to be reminded, in stark terms, that this inauguration was made possible by the gutting of the very same Voting Rights Act that was passed as a result of Selma. We needed every American, on the same day, to have to choose the future we want and the vision of America we’re cheering for.
Factionalists think they’re usurping the stage, that they’ve got the bully pulpit. They’re already flooding the airwaves with messages of their false superiority and supposed victory. I say let them. Let them converge on Washington just like they did four years ago today, when they ransacked the Capitol and hoisted the Confederate flag. Let them strut and high-five. Let them recite pompous prayers and claim that “God has given them the victory.” Let them raise their rifles and belt out “God Bless America”. Meanwhile, we’re getting on with the work.
We’re taking to heart the words a 96-year-old Martin would be saying to us, how none of us are too old or too young to fight. We’re building a new underground railroad that will come to the aid of the targeted, everyone from the poor to economic refugees (those people they call “illegals”), from women who need contraception to people who are trans. We’re building the voter capability to oust every single member of Congress up for reelection who hasn’t shown themself to be unequivocally for a society that works for all of us.
We’re marshalling the power of the people to hold corporations accountable and defend against law enforcement abuses. We’re running for every office, sitting on every jury and changing policy from the local level on up. We’re detoxifying our culture, embracing our power and forming us into a more perfect union. Just like they did in Selma.
Because, sociologically, this is supremacists’ swan song. They think this is the beginning of the establishment of the reign of white Jesus. But, in reality, it’s the beginning of the end of a corrosive ideology that’s plagued our nation since its birth. Because, the demographic truth is that in every way we currently measure, we’ll soon be a post-majority nation. Despite all the political power they momentarily have, their plummeting numbers all but guarantee it can’t last. The fact is, unless we allow them to completely dismantle democracy, this was the last election they’ll ever win.
That’s why, as much as at any juncture in our nation’s history, we need this moment, this January 20, to be a clear and unambiguous call – not unlike the one that sounded exactly 60 years ago. “Come to Selma,” Martin implored an entire nation. And in a startling moment of clarity, we Americans grasped that this wasn’t just about pieces of paper put into a ballot box. It was about democracy. And the republic. And whether we’d be a nation with a future. We thought it was about them. It would turn out to be about all of us.
In Selma, the mission started with crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a man who was KKK Grand Dragon, a Confederate general, a segregationist Democrat, a US senator, and a racial terrorist. Advancing meant facing off against a wall of troopers and against a county posse formed by Sheriff Jim Clark, who’d ordered every white-identifying man in Dallas County over the age of twenty-one to report to the courthouse to be deputized.
Their struggle was made tangible in the image of Amelia Boynton’s unconscious body lying on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and John Lewis’ broken bones and bleeding wounds. Their mettle was tested by arrests, threats of violence and acts of violence, by KKK rallies and buildings set afire. By segregationists who kept attacking, kept intimidating, and kept escalating.
The would-be oppressors did everything they could to break marchers’ spirits, to make them cower and scatter, make them duck and cover. But marchers did the opposite. They met every attack with resolve, with courage, with humanity. And, with more Americans. To the point where they vastly outnumbered those who’d tried to break them, to stop them. They persevered, and in doing so, they triumphed. Because, the only way for those who stand for justice to lose is to allow their spirits to be broken.
Which, gets us back to today. Like so much of this segment of history, we’ve allowed the Selma march to be mythologized, treated like it’s a nice fairy tale or something that happened “back in the old days.” That’s made it easy for us to forget what it was really like and what it cost. But there are millions of people alive today who lived it. They remember, with startling clarity, what that America was like. We need them to remind us so we’ll do whatever it takes to never be that America again. That’s what MLK Day is about.
They want to tell us it’s about Black history and segregation, about all those bad things that happened long, long ago. It isn’t. It’s about American history and equality, and about all the ways we’re still falling short of it today. It’s about all of us, the virtues that birthed us and the dream Martin held for us, about inalienable rights and liberty and justice for all. About the republic for which the flag flies, and about being a government of, by and for the people.
So, like those Americans who converged on Selma, it’s time to commit ourselves to the struggle. It’s time to declare that we won’t be dissuaded. Because those of us who want a society that works for all of us are the new majority. It’s high time we started acting like it. Sixty years ago, Martin made his call to action. This is ours.
We’re setting out with one purpose – to awaken the movement that can combat oppression, resist deportations, protect the vulnerable, end poverty, ensure justice, detoxify culture and make us a government of, by and for the people. A movement that can completely upend Congress in 2026, dominate the presidential election in 2028 and, at long last, make Martin’s dream, our reality.
We’ve got one more bridge to cross.
—
The song I’m sending you off with today is a classic. Written by Julie and Buddy Miller in 2004 and performed by Buddy, Wide River to Cross captures the same quiet, yet unbreakable resolve of We Shall Overcome, while, at the same time, acknowledging what a rough road it’s been and how, even now, the journey is far from over. I can almost hear the “amens” of the Selma marchers when I listen to it.
But it’s not just about them. The “I” in this song is also the United States of America. And even though we’ve “stumbled and strayed, and we can trace the tracks we’ve made,” our hearts still recall who we are; the legacy of those who’ve come before us and the heritage of those who’ll come after. If we can commit ourselves to both restoring our strength and reawakening our resolve, to finding the things we’ve lost and to, at the same time, journeying on, we’ll not only meet that wide river. We’ll make it across.
There's a sorrow in the wind, blowing' down the road I've been. I can hear it cry while shadows steal the sun. But I cannot look back now. I've come too far to turn around, and there's still a race ahead that I must run.
I'm only halfway home, I gotta journey on to where I'll find the things that I have lost.
I've come a long, long road. Still I've got miles to go. I've got a wide, wide river to cross.
I have stumbled I have strayed. You can trace the tracks I made, all across the memories my heart recalls. But I'm just a refugee, won't you say a prayer for me, cause sometimes even the strongest soldier falls.
I'm only halfway home, I gotta journey on to where I'll find the things that I have lost.
I've come a long, long road. Still I've got miles to go. I've got a wide, wide river to cross.
I've got a wide, wide river to cross.