Selma — and all it meant — brought to life

SHARON — Ten years ago, Susan Buckley and Elspeth Leacock were writing a book about real-life people who had pursued freedom in one form or another. They hoped to find a young person who had participated in the famous march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, so they called The National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma. The woman who answered the phone said, “You want my sister, Lynda. She was the youngest person on the Selma march.”

When they contacted her, Lynda Blackmon Lowery was a middle-aged wife and mother of two grown girls, and a senior case manager at a mental health center in Selma. But on the morning of her 15th birthday, she had woken up in a tent halfway between Selma and Montgomery.

Lowery was surprised to hear from the writers. “I didn’t have a story to tell,” she said in a telephone interview last week from her home in Selma. “I was just doing what I had to do.”

She speaks slowly and deliberately, with the kind of Alabama accent that turns “pen” and “fill” into two-syllable words. Her voice is gentle, and she chuckles often.

Despite Lowery’s modesty, Buckley and Leacock knew she did have a story to tell. They interviewed her and included her story in their book. But they felt she had much more to tell, and they determined to write another book just about Lowery.

(Full disclosure: I have worked with Buckley and Leacock in the past. And, after speaking with Lowery for an hour and a half, I want to write a book about her, too.)

“Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the Selma Voting Rights March” finally came out last year. Since then, Lowery has traveled all over the country telling her story and sharing her experiences.

On Sunday, May 1, she and Buckley will be at the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon. Lowery’s visit to the Northwest Corner is part of a week-long tour that will also take her to Baltimore, New York City and Clearwater, Fla.

“Now that I’m retired,” she said, “I can move as much as I want to and go as much as I want to.”

When I suggested that she seemed to be working even harder since she retired, Lowery laughed, “No, I’m having fun!”

Lowery’s story began in 1957, when she was 7 years old. Her mother was ill and needed a blood transfusion. The hospitals in Selma had blood available, but they did not accept black patients. Lowery’s mother died.

“I vowed that nobody would ever grow up without a mommy because of the color of her skin,” Lowery said. “I decided at 7  years old that when I got big, I was gonna change that.

“Little did I know that ‘getting big’ meant seeing and hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when I was 13.”

The real Dr. King

Lowery and her younger sister, Joanne, had never heard of the civil rights leader. When they were told they were “going to see King,” they expected to meet the German shepherd from the television show Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

Lowery said, “James Baldwin introduced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and we looked at each other,” wondering what happened to the dog. 

“Then this man came out and he started to talk. I was sitting on the edge of my seat. He sounded like he was saying something you needed to hear.”

King focused on the struggle for voting rights. Technically, the 15th Amendment had guaranteed people of all races and colors the right to vote. But most Southern states had laws that placed insurmountable obstacles in the way of blacks who attempted to register.

During the talk, King said, “You can get anybody to do anything with steady, loving confrontation.”

That phrase struck Lowery. Then, “the second time he said it, it sounded like he said, ‘Lynda, you can get anybody to do anything with steady, loving confrontation.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah. That’s how I’m gonna change things.’”

Non-violent resistance

King asked for volunteers to join the movement. Lowery signed up immediately.

First, she took classes in non-violent resistance led by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“They had young people teaching younger people. You would learn how to, for example — If you go and sit at this counter, and I spit in your face, you would just sit there.”

Older teens and college students participated in sit-ins at restaurants and lunch counters. Younger children like Lowery marched.

“Between January third and March seventh of 1965, I had been jailed nine times.”

Tales of beatings, abuse

This is the story told in “Turning 15” — the marches, the arrests, the beatings, the tear gas. Just one example: Lowery was among three busloads of children who were held for nine days in two different state prison camps without their parents ever being told where they were. The entire time, they were fed nothing but black-eyed peas and bread.

“I am 66 years old now,” Lowery said, “and I don’t eat nobody’s black-eyed peas.”

When retelling these events and relating things that were said to her, Lowery used a word that is noticeably absent from the book. Then she was careful to explain why she is opposed to the use of the word. “It implies ownership,” she said.

“My father and I used to walk down the street, holding hands, laughing, going to the store. My father would have on his hat, shoulders back, he’d look so strong. 

“Then we would go into a store, and I’d see him visibly change. His head would go down, his hat would go off, his shoulders would slump. And a white child younger than me could say, ‘What do you want, n-----?’ to my father. 

“And my father couldn’t do anything. He would hold my hand, squeeze it tight, so I wouldn’t say or do anything.

“That word will never be acceptable to me. There’s no way to say that word so it will not hurt somebody.”

Speaking mainly of rap artists who frequently use the word, Lowery explains that changing the final “er” to an “a” doesn’t change the word. “These young men glamorize it. They need to stop. Period. Because they’ll never be able to make the hurt go away for the people who know what that word means.”

The book concludes with the group’s triumphant arrival and rally in Montgomery. After that, Lowery’s role in the movement changed.

“My grandmother always said we were free as long as we didn’t let anything own our minds.” Lowery’s grandmother had moved in with the family to help raise the four children after their mother’s death. When she says “my parents,” Lowery is referring to her father and her grandmother. 

“She said you had to tend your mind like a garden. You had to cultivate it and water it and feed it and seed it with knowledge.”

So Lowery returned to school. In addition to working on her own studies, she also took tests for students who were out marching, as others had taken tests for her while she was away. She tutored other children who had missed classes in order to protest. And yes, the teachers — who, like the students, were black — knew what was happening. In many cases, they helped.

The voting rights movement ended on Aug. 6, 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress. Lowery completed her education, married, had two children and got divorced.

Moving up — and away

Over that time, she discovered an unexpected downside to integration.

“We grew up in the projects,” she said. “It really was a village. Everybody took care of everybody else — helped each other out. Because nobody had any more than the other person. They depended on each other, because we were a big family. 

“When the Voting Rights Act passed and everything was over, people started moving up, as they say. They thought they had arrived, and they started moving out. And they stopped thinking about their fellow man. If they had moved up and out, they didn’t reach back for anybody else.

“That’s one thing I really do think hurt us in the projects. It hurt us because of the mindset of the people. When people could move up and out, they started getting stupid. They’d stop speaking to you. 

“That was a tragedy. Because now, nobody knows what it is to be family, to lean on each other. A lot of families don’t know what it is to be a family. Families have a responsibility toward each other; they don’t know about that.”

In 1971, Lowery visited an old friend from the movement who was living in New York City. The friend suggested that Lowery and the girls move in with her. As Lowery tells it: “I looked around the city and I said ‘I can’t raise children here. It’s wall to wall concrete and dog poop.’

“We rode the subway — she was showing me some area of Brooklyn — and when we got off the subway, it looked like 5,000 people got off with us. I said ‘I can’t raise children here, there’s too many doggone people.’

“Cuz you know, I’m real country,” she adds. “Alabama country.”

But the friend persisted. 

“We were riding the Staten Island Ferry,” Lowery said. “We got off the ferry, we were on Richmond Avenue. I said, ‘And what does this remind you of?’ And she said, ‘Jefferson Davis Street in Selma.’ And I said, ‘It most certainly does. I could live here and raise children. You have front doors and back doors, and you have grass. I could raise children here.’”

So Lowery bought a house on Staten Island, and she and her daughters moved north.

“I like to tell people that, by the grace of God, I raised two girls in New York City with no pregnancies, no drugs and no welfare. I got them through high school and into college.”

With the girls on their own, she moved back to Alabama and married Collie Lowery, “my first crush from when I was 12 years old.” That was in 1987, and the marriage is still going strong today.

At first, her husband accompanied her on her many book tours. But the increased travel that came with retirement proved hard to keep up with. 

“He’s still working. So he said, ‘Nah, you go on. I’m all right.’”

Lowery’s presentation at the Hotchkiss Library, which begins at 4 p.m., will be aimed at both teenagers and adults. Lowery says that the idea of the book is “for young people to read it and get a sense of being there — to feel like they are taking part in the event.”