50 years ago, Selma was a turning point for the civil rights movement and a watershed moment for the church
It was five days after “Bloody Sunday” — the day civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, were attacked by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.
“We Catholics here in the Northwest are physically a long way from our suffering Negro brothers in Selma but spiritually their cause is close to our hearts,” The Catholic Northwest Progress said in an editorial on March 12, 1965.
That editorial announced the decision by Seattle Archbishop Thomas A. Connolly to support the Seattle Catholic Interracial Council’s call inviting clergy and lay Catholics to participate in a march and demonstration for “the moral support of the cause of the Negroes in Selma.”
The same edition of the newspaper marked a watershed moment for the nation and the church by quoting Father Maurice Ouillet, superior of the Society of St. Edmund. The society operated Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma, opened in 1943 to serve black people.
“I can state unquestionably that we priests felt very badly because we could not take part in the (Selma) march, but we abide by the decision of the authorities in the diocese not to join in street demonstrations,” said Father Ouillet, pastor of a black parish. “We did what we could but we’d like to do more.”
The pent-up desire to do more was fed by 100 years of racial discrimination in the U.S. following the Civil War.
Contours of the racial divide
Experiences of black Catholics now living in Western Washington trace the contours of the country’s racial divide.
Deacon LaMar Reed of St. Anthony’s Parish in Renton recalls sitting in a car with a friend in front of his parents’ house in Los Angeles. As the two teenagers talked, a police car came around the corner and slowed down, the officers looking inside before continuing on. “I told my friend, they’re coming back,” Deacon Reed said. And so they did, this time shining their lights on Reed and his friend.
“They get out of the car, one officer on one side and one officer on the other. I see one officer with his hand on his weapon. And he’s asking, ‘What’s up?’” Deacon Reed laughs as he relates the story of explaining that he and his friend were just talking, that the car belonged to his father and that they were parked in front of his parents’ house.
“Getting stopped by law enforcement was pretty common, I don’t care where you lived,” said Deacon Reed, who lived in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. “If you’re black, the law enforcement people take a look at you maybe a little bit more than they would someone else.”
That was in the early 1960s and “things haven’t changed,” Deacon Reed said. Racial violence in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities over the past two years have been a reminder that the nation’s history for the last 150 years is the story of two Americas, one white and one black.
Reflecting on that disunity, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, Kentucky, summed up what has recently become all too clear.
“There are reminders across our nation today that the embers of racial discrimination still smolder,” he said in a 2014 statement.
‘The hostility was there’
Black Catholics now living in Western Washington experienced that discrimination while growing up in the years preceding the civil rights movement as well as the sometimes violent racial tension that erupted at its highpoint in the mid-1960s and 1970s.
What was it like to be African-American in those tumultuous days?
When Martin Luther King Jr. led his march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery in 1965, Se’Vera Dowe, now a member of Immaculate Conception Parish in Seattle, was living with her family in Montgomery. She and some of her younger relatives wanted to join the marchers for the last few miles, but the adults, fearful of repercussions, warned them to stay out of it.
The protective reaction of Dowe’s older relatives was commonplace among black parents in those years of protests and riots. “The hostility was there,” Dowe recalled.
During the same time period, Corliss Nesbitt-Reed (Deacon Reed’s wife) was living in Buffalo, New York. Those days were “a very difficult time. A very scary time,” she said.
“We lived the riots, because we lived around the corner from where most of the rioting was happening in Buffalo,” she said. “I’ll never forget, my mother sent my brother and me to the store one evening, and we were just walking to the store and a bullet went over our heads.”
The police would often drive onto their neighborhood street, park and sit in their patrol car for hours during those tense years, Nesbitt-Reed said. The intimidation affected everyone in the community. “Where I lived, the kids played outside, and when the police came, the kids would go inside and the parents wouldn’t let them go outside because they were afraid of what was going to happen,” she said.
By his own admission, Deacon Reed was anything but a rabble-rouser. “I always tried to be this sort of peacemaker, you know, tried to make it work, but it wasn’t always possible,” he said.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Reed was part of a group of black Marines who decided to have a memorial service on their base in honor of the slain civil-rights leader. When the base commander denied their request, about 30 black Marines decided not to show up for work in protest.
“We wanted to make a point that we were serious,” Deacon Reed said. “Now in the military, you don’t not go to work, but we decided we’re not going to go to work.”
The group stayed in the barracks. Within 10 minutes, their company commander and others came to the barracks “calling us names you can’t even repeat,” Deacon Reed said. The black Marines who participated were restricted to the base for two months.
After his discharge, Reed considered becoming a police officer, even though the decision was not popular with his friends.
“If you start telling your friends you want to be a cop, then you’re on the other side,” he said. “I was super naïve about what I could do to help in the community,” he recalled. “As far as getting jobs, police departments were hiring and military men were at the top of that list. I didn’t get on because I’m colorblind,” he said with a laugh, “which was a good thing, maybe.”
Selma: Awakening the church’s social conscience
Nationally and locally, the social conscience of the church was stirred as growing racial unrest emerged after the Selma march on March 7, 1965.
Even though it had been mostly silent on the issue of race for 100 years, the church’s longstanding social conscience on civil rights for African-Americans began to emerge through the actions of bishops, priests and religious.
“Whenever you saw a march, you’d see a nun,” Nesbitt-Reed said, acknowledging the church’s civil rights efforts.
Clergy, including dozens of Catholic priests, joined Martin Luther King Jr. for a subsequent march from Selma.
In Seattle, Father John Lynch, moderator of the Seattle Catholic Interracial Council, led an estimated 300 marchers from the federal courthouse to St. James Cathedral on March 16, 1965, where a “Mass of Reparation” was celebrated in support of the Selma demonstrations.
On the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, Archbishop Kurtz recalled such efforts by “many civic, business, and religious leaders, students, laborers, educators and all others of good will who courageously stood up for racial justice.”
Racism and the hardships it inflicts on African-Americans are an indelible and enduring part of our national history, but as Archbishop Kurtz said, so too are the personal sacrifices by men and women willing to rise up “against bigotry, violence, ignorance, and fear.”