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Last year, my husband and I took our sons on a road trip to Selma, Alabama. I had hoped to possibly extend the trip to Plateau to try and visit the home of Cudjo Lewis, or to pop down to Gulf Shores for a couple of lazy days on the beach. But we only had a few days of overlapping vacation days between the four of us, and – as we’d later find out – the world would close while we wrapped up our short holiday anway. So it was just as well that we didn’t make more plans, as we’d surely have had to cancel them.
Blessedly, our trip did not end before we were able to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Our family got to hear John Lewis speak several years ago when a local political group brought him to our city for a speaking engagement. And since that time, I’d been enraptured by this hero’s social justice work. Being able to literally walk where he walked on Bloody Sunday in 1965, was an unforgettably meaningful moment.
When the movie Selma came out, my husband and I went to see it together. I am unsure what I expected from the drama based on tragic historical events, but I don’t think my expectations included the weeping that issued from my body while we watched a dramatized, slow-motion beating of nonviolent protesters at the hands of police officers and state troopers play out on the screen. Clergypeople, housewives, and college students were all among the crowd of people who assembled in support of Black Americans’ determination to exercise their right to register and vote.
I’ve never been able to watch the movie Selma since seeing it in the theatre. And while I recommend it as one of this week’s suggested resources, I also understand that it may be too graphic for some viewers to watch. Therefore, I also recommend the documentary
After Selma, which includes the perspective of residents who still live in Selma, interspersed with a broader national context.
There’s so much more to say here, about decades of brute force visited upon Black bodies to ensure that we don’t experience full access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in this country; about Bombingham and dynamite hill; about four Black schoolgirls killed in a Birmingham church bombing, whose killers were not tried and sentenced until 2001.
But perhaps more important than adding tragic facts to tragic facts is to pause and reflect on new knowledge we’ve taken in. As you watch Selma and/or After Selma, I hope you’ll sit with the following questions:
- How much of your faith and commitment to agitating for social justice is hampered by the belief that all our present troubles – including, unjust, tragic, untimely deaths – pale in comparison to the glory of the afterlife?
- In your mind and heart, where is the dividing line between accepting physical suffering as a consequence of living in a fallen world, and extending a helping hand of love and solidarity to people in need?
As theologian James Cone states in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.”
Too often the message that Black Americans, especially Black Christians, have received implicitly and explicitly from white pulpits in this so-called Christian nation, is that Black people should look to the afterlife for their liberation and accept their unjust lot in life on Earth.
I do believe, as a person of faith, that one day, glory will come and will indeed be ours. But I do not believe we have to wait until we die to live without fearing our lives or our children’s lives will be abruptly cut short by a dominant culture that doesn’t value our personhood.
I hope you’ll keep showing up here to this space, so we can keep working to construct peace in each of our lives, one piece at a time.
