Sunday, May 18
David James here
Here is a link to my Freedom Summer '08 Resource Page, entitled Freedom Summer 08 Miscellany, where I hope to put lots more stuff. But for now, on the page are MP3s of Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round, Ain't Scared of Nobody 'Cause I Want My Freedom, Freedom Calypso Chant, and Been Down Into the South.
Also on the site is the sheet music for Been Down Into the South, Freedom, Freedom Rider, I'm Gonna Do What the Spirit Says Do, and Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Freedom.
This is what I've been doing instead of going to church in Selma this morning. Doing this for my friends is my way of "going to church."
Yesterday we marched the path of the 1965 March 7 "Bloody Sunday" March, from Brown Chapel to over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the marchers under the leadership of John Lewis and Hosea Williams got the hell beat out of them by Alabama troopers and "posse." The day started out with the successful acquisition of a digital recorder to replace my mini-disc machine that started skipping while playing back material I had recorded. I'll attend to that when I get back to South Bend, and try to rescue the material off the discs. There was a Radio Shack (Black owned, and she knew her stuff) right by the Pettus Bridge; couldn't be beat. While there I got some blank CDs to surprise everyone today with a recording of the four Freedom Songs that you who are not on this trip can hear on the Resource Page (link above).
The real phenomenon of the day was the Selma tour with civil rights Veteran Joanne Bland. She was eight years old when she went on the first '65 march, and has been "in it" ever since. She it was who started the National Voting Rights Museum on Water Ave. in sight of the bridge.
Thanks Les Lamon and Monica Tetzlaf for connecting us with this astounding person. She took us through the "projects," where she was iving then, virtually unchanged since '65; she talked to us on the steps of the Brown Chapel, conducted us through the Voting Rights Museum, and sent us two-by-two over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, singing all the way over. You know, every time I write on this blasted blog about a person whom we've met, I describe one or another amazing person we have met. This is not starry-eyed idealism, children, I am sixty-one years old and I hope able to spot a winner when I meet one. These people are winners. They won their fights by being the people they are, and doing things the right way. I see no monument to "Bull" Connor or Sheriff Clark, but there's one to Amelia Boynton, whom he beat nearly to death; there's one to John Lewis, and there's one to Hosea Williams. Joanne Bland is a walking monument. You'll be lucky to meet her and hear her talk. try and listen to the audio files that will be at the IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center. She's "dead on."
There was one particularly interesting project of the Voting Rights Museum that I must comment on. To pariphrase our guide, the place was dedicated to remembering and gathering the histories of the "forgotton people" of the Selma movement--the ordinary people who marched, cooked for and sheltered the marchers, made signs gave medical treatment--were "there" in one way or another. There's a whole wall of messages from some of these people, and I'll try to put up a photograph of a couple of these messages for you maybe this evening. This kind of thing is what I'd love to see happen to the Natatorium project in South Bend.
Five of us got a glimpse of what it was like to be captured and sent into slavery from Africa, down the street from the Voting Rights Museum at the Civil War and Slavery Museum. Along with some older tourists, we were made to hang our heads and blindly obey, as we were herded into a boat for our journey to the south and terrorized by slave masters. These friends were very theatrical and dramatic, and have clearly accomplished a lot with a very low budget. It was a real "experience."
All right, enough for now. We will soon shove off for Montgomery and, I am sure, some more amazing experiences. Lemme try and get a photo or two up, one of us at the Brown Chapel, and maybe one of the messages on the wall of the remembrance in the VRM. If you see them at the top of this post, you'll know I've been successfully
Yours Truly, still in the fight
David James
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