Voting precious and powerful

I was 22 years old when I decided to take a road trip with three friends from Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven to Selma, Ala. Today, as Maryland and the nation leave a terrible year behind on the road to 2021, I hope everyone will take to heart what I learned in 1965.

It was a Sunday night, March 7, and in those days most people were at home watching TV. A big movie was on, “Judgment at Nuremberg,” about the Holocaust and the moral culpability of Germans in that horror. Shortly after the film started, ABC News interrupted with a breaking report from Selma.

Peaceful Black marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge were being gassed and clubbed by white police officers. All they wanted was equal voting rights. Watching “Selma’s Bloody Sunday ” on TV was like watching George Floyd’s eight minutes and 46 seconds on your cellphone today — a moment of searing clarity that screamed “Do something!” My three seminary buddies and I jumped into a Renault at 5 a.m. to answer Martin Luther King ’s call — white clergy were needed to join the protests in Selma.

We were just seminary students, but there we were, white guys heading to the Deep South. We didn’t understand what we were getting ourselves into until we stopped overnight at Tuskegee University in Alabama. There we saw firsthand casualties from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, young Black men with bandaged heads, arms in slings and bruised faces limping about the Black college’s dining hall.

By the time we arrived at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma and joined other protesters, I was feeling, for the first time in my life, fear. We were told to wear coats and ties to the march. Women were to wear dresses or skirts because we wanted everyone watching on TV to know we were decent Americans who wanted equal voting rights.

We were also told to remove the dome light inside our car so snipers would be less able to shoot us at night.

The next morning we walked two-by-two from Brown Chapel AME to the mayor’s house singing, “We Shall Overcome.” We knew we were bound for jail and worse.

That day I slipped into the middle of the walkers. I did not want to be first. When we arrived in the mayor’s neighborhood, hounded by white protesters, the police arrested people and loaded us into school buses.

They arrested everyone in front of me, and there I was singing “We Shall Overcome.” Wilson Baker, the public safety commissioner, walked over to me, with the TV cameras, and said in his Southern drawl, “Young man, you shouldn’t be down here on no picket line, you should be up north taking singing lessons.” Then I was arrested and spent a night in jail. The next morning I marched back to Brown Chapel.

That road trip changed me just like Selma’s protests changed America. But the journey to justice isn’t over.

What our challenges in 2020 taught me is that the right to vote is precious and powerful. So in this New Year, please join me in our march to a more perfect union. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020 is already drafted. It sits, like a silent conscience, in the halls of Congress, waiting for legislators to hear that clarion call — “Do something!” —