The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Author describes Selma through youthful eyes
By now I hope you’ve seen “Selma,” which was filmed largely in metro Atlanta. Its powerful ballad “Glory,” by John Legend and Common, just won an Academy Award for best song.
If the movie, for which director Ava DuVernay and star David Oyelowo earned Golden Globe nominations, has awakened your interest in history, consider picking up “Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom” (Dial Books, $19.99), by Lynda Blackmon Lowery.
I met with Lowery, whose book was written with Elspeth Leacock and Susan Buckley and illustrated by P. J. Loughran, during a recent trip to Selma, Ala., for the movie’s premiere there.
The memoir of Lowery’s involvement in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march movement is written for young adults but appropriate for any age.
“By the time I was 15 years old, I had been in jail nine times,” it begins. She and her younger sister were among the people set upon by law enforcement officers, beaten for the crime of peacefully marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
“Up until two years ago, I couldn’t tell that story about seeing my sister looking like she was dead,” Lowery said. “It took me years to be able to talk about it without trembling inside. Over the years, it has gradually gotten better. Telling the story makes it better.”
When “Selma” came to Selma to film some key scenes, Lowery got involved. She served as an extra during the bridge scene, and was grateful for the big crowd of people there. To this day, it brings back harrowing memories.
“I can drive over it because I know I’m going to scoot, but I can’t walk over it by myself,” she said.
“I get too scared. The bridge scenes were very real to me. I got beaten on that bridge and I carry those scars with me today.”
In her job as a case manager for a mental health center, she has at times had to intervene when people threatened to harm themselves.
“I have had to talk three people off that bridge,” she said.
Lowery was 7 when her mother died following complications from a childbirth. The era’s segregation meant black patients received inferior care.
“That’s what segregation did to me,” Lowery said. “It took my mama away.”
She has funneled the pain of that loss, and of those turbulent years during the civil rights movement, into her work and now, into her book.
“I am a very religious person and I think this is what God has me to do: help people,” she said. “I think I have found strength in serving others.”