The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
FINAL CROSSING IS 'POETIC JUSTICE'
Nation joins moment as Rep. John Lewis invokes ‘good trouble’ once more, traverses Pettus Bridge.
SELMA, ALA. — Deanna Moton was 14 years old when she marched over the Edmund Pettus Bridge more than a half-century ago, only a few feet behind the young man at the front of the line wearing a backpack and tan trench coat.
Moton watched that day, March 7, 1965 — known as “Bloody Sunday” — as Alabama state troopers fired tear gas and bludgeoned marchers, including John Lewis, knocking him unconscious.
That day galvanized her into a lifetime of activism, and compelled the septuagenarian to travel back from Rock Hill, South Carolina, to watch Lewis cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge — his coffin in a horse-drawn caisson — one last time Sunday.
“Here we are together,” Moton said before the coffin, with tears in her eyes and her hand on her chest. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You took hits for the movement. You bled on that bridge for this movement. I am forever indebted to you.”
Hundreds joined her, lining Broad Street to say goodbye to a civil rights icon who counseled presidents, spent 17 terms in Congress
and was known the world over as a symbol of love, nonviolence and racial healing.
The carriage drew Lewis’ flag-draped casket from the nearby Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where the Selma march had begun.
‘This is where it started. This is not where it ends, but this is the last time he will cross this bridge and it was so important for me to be here to witness this.’ Patrice Houston, 57, who made the trip from Atlanta to Selma, Alabama
Unlike Lewis’ annual pilgrimages to the bridge, in which he led thousands of admirers, the caisson crossed the bridge alone.
Rose petals were scattered on its asphalt path, a symbol of the blood shed 55 years earlier. Crowds shouted “thank you” and “good trouble,” as the carriage passed, then fell silent as it stopped at the bridge’s apex, beneath the awning bearing Pettus’ name. The driver, Darrell Watkins, stood, removed his top hat and held it to his heart.
Lewis’ surviving siblings and son, John-Miles Lewis, met the caisson there and followed it for the remainder of its journey.
On the other side of the Alabama River, Lewis’ extended family met it, singing “We Shall Overcome.” A line of Alabama state troopers saluted the man their predecessors once bloodied on the same ground.
“It’s poetic justice that this time Alabama state troopers will see John to his safety,” Congresswoman Terri Sewell, D-Ala., said during a brief program ahead of the crossing.
The scene was a bookend to a career that spanned more than six decades, a moment designed to remind America of how far it has come since “Bloody Sunday” pricked the nation’s consciousness, as Lewis often liked to say.
The attacks that Lewis, Moton and hundreds of civil rights protesters sustained that day opened white America’s eyes to the struggles of Black people, which it had long ignored. A week later, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would support legislation guaranteeing African Americans full voting rights. Months later, he signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.
The weight of Sunday’s events was lost to no one who converged on this small central Alabama river town, many wearing face masks and T-shirts bearing Lewis’ face or signature catchphrases.
Jeraldyne Dorsey, 72, a Midway, Alabama, resident who watched the event with a friend and her daughter said, “He tried what we couldn’t try, he did what we couldn’t do.”
After the crossing, Lewis’ hearse traveled along the route marchers eventually took to Montgomery, where his body would lie in state through the evening in the Alabama Capitol.
In Selma, Moton had been disappointed to learn the public wouldn’t be allowed to cross the bridge with Lewis. But she was blown away when the caisson bearing his casket stopped in front of her for several minutes ahead of the ceremony.
Then she followed it to where she had to stop, and quietly watched it make its way across the slightly rising bridge, where it seemed to fade into pale blue skies and bright sun, and out of view. She captured the moment on her iPhone.
A floral arrangement at the foot of the bridge — white lilies, roses and gladiolus, which traditionally represent strength, sincerity, integrity — was separated, with flowers given to those present. Moton was given white gladiolus.
As she crossed the bridge at the end of the ceremony, she pulled petals from her flowers and let them fall onto the rose petals. The fight, she said, continues.
“When George Floyd’s life was snuffed out and people saw it, it rekindled the human spirit of human life,” said Moton, a long time psychotherapist who has been active in voter registration efforts. “I think people see what we are doing is fighting not for civil rights but human rights.”
Patrice Houston, 57, made the journey from Atlanta to see Lewis’ final crossing.
“This is where it started,” she said. “This is not where it ends, but this is the last time he will cross this bridge and it was so important for me to be here to witness this.”