50 YEARS AFTER SELMA: Berea Alumni Recall How March Changed Their Lives
SOME FACULTY, STUDENTS AND GRADUATES PLAN TO JOIN 50TH ANNIVERSARY EVENT
BY TOM EBLEN
Herald-Leader Columnist
February 16, 2015
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke during the third Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights in March 1965. About 60 Berea College students and faculty members took part in the march, and student Mike Clark took this photo while covering the event for the school newspaper. MIKE CLARK
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. put out a call in spring 1965 for people to come to Alabama and march for civil rights, college students across the country jumped at the chance. College presidents shuddered.
Alabama cops and racist thugs had beaten previous marchers, killing two. University administrators worried about the safety of students, the fears of parents, and the anger of conservative donors and community members.
Officials at Berea College, the South’s oldest interracial school, had an additional complication as campus opinion split over the civil rights movement and its tactics.
“Berea’s motto is ‘God hath made of one blood all nations of men,’” recalled Ann Grundy, then a freshman and one of 35 blacks among Berea’s 1,400 students. “Why did they ever tell us that? It became our weapon. We hammered them across the head to let us go.”
Berea President Francis Hutchins refused to sanction the trip, even after students marched on his house. But his heart was with them.
“They realized that morally we were correct,” Grundy said. “They just had to find a way to do it.”
Hutchins quietly loaned them his car and helped rent a Greyhound bus so 58 students and teachers could join the triumphant final day of the march from Selma to Montgomery, which led to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The 50th anniversary is attracting a lot of attention this year, in part because of Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed film,
Selma, a contender for the best picture Oscar at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
A two-month commemoration began last week in Selma. Among the participants March 7 and 8 will be a busload of Berea students, faculty and alumni who will include Grundy and 10 others who made the first trip. Of the original 58, 43 are still alive.
This time, Berea’s participation is official, organized by Alicestyne Turley, an African and African-American studies professor who directs the Carter G. Woodson Center for Interracial Education.
Among other things, the group plans to attend festivities at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the first two of King’s three marches ended almost as soon as they began. The first one, on March 7, 1965, became known as “Bloody Sunday” after police beat the peaceful marchers as they tried to cross the bridge. A second attempt two days later came to be called “Turnaround Tuesday” because, when confronted by police, King led the marchers back to a church in Selma.
King then sought a federal court order to protect marchers on their journey to the state Capitol in Montgomery, as well as federal legislation protecting black people’s right to register and vote. On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Congress for that legislation in a nationally televised speech.
The third and final march began March 21 under the protection of 4,000 federalized troops and law enforcement officers. Limited by the court order to 300 marchers on narrow parts of the road to Montgomery, the protest swelled to more than 25,000 as they reached the Capitol on March 25.
The Berea group spent all night driving through Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama to join that final day of marching. They carefully planned their route to include rest and refueling stops at places where it would be safe for blacks and whites to be seen traveling together.
“There were many white people at Berea who stepped outside their comfort zone to help us,” Grundy said. “Without their support, it would not have happened.”
She remembers an electric atmosphere, with students singing civil rights songs and talking about issues all night.
“On the bus we talked a lot about why we were doing it,” she said. “I remember being nervous, but when you’re 18 years old, what do you know about fear?”
Grundy led much of the singing. A piano major, her father had been pastor of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, where, three years after his death, Klansmen placed a bomb that killed four girls attending Sunday school on Sept. 15, 1963.
When they arrived at a Catholic school complex outside Montgomery where thousands were waiting to join the marchers coming from Selma, the Bereans organized behind a banner painted with their school’s motto. They carried signs with another school motto, in Latin, that means “victory through suffering.”
“I felt sort of a oneness with all of the people there from all over the United States,” said John Fleming, another black Berea student who had participated in lunch-counter sit-ins as a teenager in Morganton, N.C.
Fleming’s most vivid memories from that day are of watching people on the sidewalks as the march passed through Montgomery
— the icy stares and slurs of whites and the joyful faces and cheers of blacks who had been warned not to join the protest.
“I wondered what they were all thinking,” he said. “And I realized that the only way change is going to happen is for individuals to make a decision that they are going to take a stand.”
Berea student Mike Clark watched much of the day through the viewfinder of the school newspaper’s camera. He was the sports editor, but he learned to use the camera when the newspaper’s conservative photographer refused to make the trip.
“What I was looking at was pretty dramatic; all I needed to do was focus,” said Clark, who recently sent some of those old pictures to Berea.
Clark was a white boy from the North Carolina mountains. The first black people he ever met were chain-gang convicts who worked on the road outside his house. As a teenage restaurant cook, he worked for a black man he respected. Clark’s mother was a Christian who taught him that everyone deserved equal treatment.
He remembers running ahead of the march to take photographs as it approached the Capitol. There he encountered King and his lieutenants standing by the flatbed truck that would serve as the speakers’ platform for their rally.
“There was no security, so I just went up and chatted with them,” Clark recalled. “We were all just looking out at the crowd that stretched out in front of us for blocks. It was an inspiring moment. He had been a hero of mine for quite a while, so to meet him personally was pretty cool.”
At the march’s dramatic conclusion, King and others spoke, and Harry Belafonte and Peter, Paul and Mary sang. A line of police with billy clubs watched them from the Capitol steps.
“I can remember looking up at the state Capitol,” Grundy said, “and seeing (Gov.) George Wallace pulling back the curtain to peek and see what was going on.”
But Grundy’s most vivid memory was of a rest stop in Collinsville, Ala., on the way back that night. Zodia Belle Johnson Vaughn, the mother of black Berea freshman Robert Johnson, opened her home to the students and fed them delicious fried chicken, biscuits and collard greens.
“You know how they talk about Jesus and the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Well, he didn’t have anything on Mrs. Vaughan and her friends and neighbors,” Grundy said. “That to me was the highlight of the trip, because it demonstrated the many ways that people can support a struggle.”
After their return to campus, black students felt especially energized, and they focused that energy on Berea College.
Abolitionist John G. Fee founded the school in 1855 to educate freed blacks in an atmosphere of equality among the races and sexes. But in 1904, Kentucky legislators outlawed interracial education, and Berea refocused its mission on educating Appalachian white students of modest means.
Black students were admitted again after the segregation law was repealed in 1950, but there were few of them — and no black faculty.
“Coming back from that trip we were definitely fired up,” Grundy said. “We really kicked in with the organization of the Black Student Union and started pressing Berea for black faculty, black staff, more students, more black course work.”
Today, Berea’s student body of nearly 1,600 is 19 percent black, 4 percent Latino, 4 percent other minorities and 10 percent international. But the faculty remains 86 percent white — a sore point with some black alumni.
The Selma-to-Montgomery marches marked a historic watershed for the nation, and it shaped many of those Berea students for the rest of their lives.
“It perhaps set the tone for what I was going to do in the future,” said Fleming, who would earn a doctorate at Howard University and become founding director of the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center and director of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
Clark became a journalist, working for fearless publishers Tom and Pat Gish at the Mountain Eagle in Whites-burg. But he soon left journalism for a career in social justice and environmental activism, leading such organizations as Greenpeace and Tennessee’s legendary Highlander Research and Education Center.
Grundy and her husband, Chester, became lifelong civil rights activists who for more than four decades have organized the annual Martin Luther King Day festivities in Lexington that have included such speakers as Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
“I think most of us look back on the march with a great deal of honor and pride,” Ann Grundy said. “I could almost feel myself growing up. I sometimes say I never got over it.”
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/02/16/3697297/50-years-after-selma-berea-alumni.html#storylink=cpy
 |
| Dr. King at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25, 1965. (Photo: Mike Clark) |
BY TOM EBLEN
Herald-Leader Columnist
February 16, 2015
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke during the third Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights in March 1965. About 60 Berea College students and faculty members took part in the march, and student Mike Clark took this photo while covering the event for the school newspaper. MIKE CLARK
When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. put out a call in spring 1965 for people to come to Alabama and march for civil rights, college students across the country jumped at the chance. College presidents shuddered.
Alabama cops and racist thugs had beaten previous marchers, killing two. University administrators worried about the safety of students, the fears of parents, and the anger of conservative donors and community members.
Officials at Berea College, the South’s oldest interracial school, had an additional complication as campus opinion split over the civil rights movement and its tactics.
“Berea’s motto is ‘God hath made of one blood all nations of men,’” recalled Ann Grundy, then a freshman and one of 35 blacks among Berea’s 1,400 students. “Why did they ever tell us that? It became our weapon. We hammered them across the head to let us go.”
Berea President Francis Hutchins refused to sanction the trip, even after students marched on his house. But his heart was with them.
“They realized that morally we were correct,” Grundy said. “They just had to find a way to do it.”
Hutchins quietly loaned them his car and helped rent a Greyhound bus so 58 students and teachers could join the triumphant final day of the march from Selma to Montgomery, which led to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The 50th anniversary is attracting a lot of attention this year, in part because of Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed film,
Selma, a contender for the best picture Oscar at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
A two-month commemoration began last week in Selma. Among the participants March 7 and 8 will be a busload of Berea students, faculty and alumni who will include Grundy and 10 others who made the first trip. Of the original 58, 43 are still alive.
This time, Berea’s participation is official, organized by Alicestyne Turley, an African and African-American studies professor who directs the Carter G. Woodson Center for Interracial Education.
Among other things, the group plans to attend festivities at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the first two of King’s three marches ended almost as soon as they began. The first one, on March 7, 1965, became known as “Bloody Sunday” after police beat the peaceful marchers as they tried to cross the bridge. A second attempt two days later came to be called “Turnaround Tuesday” because, when confronted by police, King led the marchers back to a church in Selma.
King then sought a federal court order to protect marchers on their journey to the state Capitol in Montgomery, as well as federal legislation protecting black people’s right to register and vote. On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Congress for that legislation in a nationally televised speech.
The third and final march began March 21 under the protection of 4,000 federalized troops and law enforcement officers. Limited by the court order to 300 marchers on narrow parts of the road to Montgomery, the protest swelled to more than 25,000 as they reached the Capitol on March 25.
The Berea group spent all night driving through Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama to join that final day of marching. They carefully planned their route to include rest and refueling stops at places where it would be safe for blacks and whites to be seen traveling together.
“There were many white people at Berea who stepped outside their comfort zone to help us,” Grundy said. “Without their support, it would not have happened.”
She remembers an electric atmosphere, with students singing civil rights songs and talking about issues all night.
“On the bus we talked a lot about why we were doing it,” she said. “I remember being nervous, but when you’re 18 years old, what do you know about fear?”
Grundy led much of the singing. A piano major, her father had been pastor of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, where, three years after his death, Klansmen placed a bomb that killed four girls attending Sunday school on Sept. 15, 1963.
When they arrived at a Catholic school complex outside Montgomery where thousands were waiting to join the marchers coming from Selma, the Bereans organized behind a banner painted with their school’s motto. They carried signs with another school motto, in Latin, that means “victory through suffering.”
“I felt sort of a oneness with all of the people there from all over the United States,” said John Fleming, another black Berea student who had participated in lunch-counter sit-ins as a teenager in Morganton, N.C.
Fleming’s most vivid memories from that day are of watching people on the sidewalks as the march passed through Montgomery
— the icy stares and slurs of whites and the joyful faces and cheers of blacks who had been warned not to join the protest.
“I wondered what they were all thinking,” he said. “And I realized that the only way change is going to happen is for individuals to make a decision that they are going to take a stand.”
Berea student Mike Clark watched much of the day through the viewfinder of the school newspaper’s camera. He was the sports editor, but he learned to use the camera when the newspaper’s conservative photographer refused to make the trip.
“What I was looking at was pretty dramatic; all I needed to do was focus,” said Clark, who recently sent some of those old pictures to Berea.
Clark was a white boy from the North Carolina mountains. The first black people he ever met were chain-gang convicts who worked on the road outside his house. As a teenage restaurant cook, he worked for a black man he respected. Clark’s mother was a Christian who taught him that everyone deserved equal treatment.
He remembers running ahead of the march to take photographs as it approached the Capitol. There he encountered King and his lieutenants standing by the flatbed truck that would serve as the speakers’ platform for their rally.
“There was no security, so I just went up and chatted with them,” Clark recalled. “We were all just looking out at the crowd that stretched out in front of us for blocks. It was an inspiring moment. He had been a hero of mine for quite a while, so to meet him personally was pretty cool.”
At the march’s dramatic conclusion, King and others spoke, and Harry Belafonte and Peter, Paul and Mary sang. A line of police with billy clubs watched them from the Capitol steps.
“I can remember looking up at the state Capitol,” Grundy said, “and seeing (Gov.) George Wallace pulling back the curtain to peek and see what was going on.”
But Grundy’s most vivid memory was of a rest stop in Collinsville, Ala., on the way back that night. Zodia Belle Johnson Vaughn, the mother of black Berea freshman Robert Johnson, opened her home to the students and fed them delicious fried chicken, biscuits and collard greens.
“You know how they talk about Jesus and the miracle of the loaves and fishes? Well, he didn’t have anything on Mrs. Vaughan and her friends and neighbors,” Grundy said. “That to me was the highlight of the trip, because it demonstrated the many ways that people can support a struggle.”
After their return to campus, black students felt especially energized, and they focused that energy on Berea College.
Abolitionist John G. Fee founded the school in 1855 to educate freed blacks in an atmosphere of equality among the races and sexes. But in 1904, Kentucky legislators outlawed interracial education, and Berea refocused its mission on educating Appalachian white students of modest means.
Black students were admitted again after the segregation law was repealed in 1950, but there were few of them — and no black faculty.
“Coming back from that trip we were definitely fired up,” Grundy said. “We really kicked in with the organization of the Black Student Union and started pressing Berea for black faculty, black staff, more students, more black course work.”
Today, Berea’s student body of nearly 1,600 is 19 percent black, 4 percent Latino, 4 percent other minorities and 10 percent international. But the faculty remains 86 percent white — a sore point with some black alumni.
The Selma-to-Montgomery marches marked a historic watershed for the nation, and it shaped many of those Berea students for the rest of their lives.
“It perhaps set the tone for what I was going to do in the future,” said Fleming, who would earn a doctorate at Howard University and become founding director of the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center and director of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
Clark became a journalist, working for fearless publishers Tom and Pat Gish at the Mountain Eagle in Whites-burg. But he soon left journalism for a career in social justice and environmental activism, leading such organizations as Greenpeace and Tennessee’s legendary Highlander Research and Education Center.
Grundy and her husband, Chester, became lifelong civil rights activists who for more than four decades have organized the annual Martin Luther King Day festivities in Lexington that have included such speakers as Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
“I think most of us look back on the march with a great deal of honor and pride,” Ann Grundy said. “I could almost feel myself growing up. I sometimes say I never got over it.”
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/02/16/3697297/50-years-after-selma-berea-alumni.html#storylink=cpy
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