Selma, Lord, Selma

Shyann Webb was 8 and small for her age, Rachel West
was 9. Two little girls caught up in the marches, mass
meetings, police violence, of the 1965 campaign for
voting rights in Selma, Alabama, where less than 2% of
eligible African Americans were registered to vote.

They tell about it in the book:
Selma, Lord, Selma
by Shyann Webb and Rachel West Nelson
as told to Frank Sikora
1980 University of Alabama Press

There are photos showing these smallest marchers with
Dr. Martin Luther King, who, whenever he saw them
would call out, "What do we want?" and when they
would answer: "Freedom!" would say, "I can't hear
you," and make them say it louder and louder,
"Freedom! Freedom!"

And a photo of the two on a cold day when the
marchers had been halted, Shyann in a dress, her
little legs bare, Rachel's hand-me-down pants too
small, stopping inches above her socks. They
lived near one another in a housing project, their
large families, they said, lived mostly on rice and
coffee. But they marched, and they sang the freedom
songs. Dr. King called them to the front of the church
to lead the singing.

Shyann was at the meetings at Brown Chapel almost
every day, missing so much school she'd have to repeat
the grade the next year. She heard about the arrests, the
clubbings by policemen and sheriff's deputies, and the
death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot by a state trooper
in nearby Marion. That march and Jackson's death were
not covered by the media.

About three weeks later the Rev. James Reeb died from
injuries suffered when attacked by three white hoodlums.
Reeb was among the hundreds who poured into Selma
in response to "Bloody Sunday" when the marchers
were brutally attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
They had planned to march to Montgomery, the state
capital, to protest Jackson's death.

And there were other martyrs: Viola Liuzzo was shot
and killed in her car, on her way to transport marchers
from Montgomery. Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopalian
Seminary student, one of several supporters who stayed
with Rachel's family during the Selma protests, would be
shot by a sheriff's deputy just after being released from
jail in Lowndes County on August 20th.

The little girls talked about how they might also be killed.
Rachel was on the bridge on "Bloody Sunday" and only
escaped because another marcher picked her up and ran
with her to safety.

One night they looked up at the sky, searching for the
brightest star because they had heard that when
someone dies their soul becomes a star in the heavens.
One of them pointed out an especially bright star and
said that maybe that one was Jimmie Lee Jackson.

Reeb's death was the catalyst that spurred President
Johnson and Congress to push through the Voting Rights
Act. Johnson telephoned his sympathy to Reeb's family,
and he personally announced the arrest of the Klansmen
who shot Liuzzo.There was no sympathy call to Jackson's
family, no attempt to indict the trooper who shot him.
Liuzzo and Reeb were white, Jackson was Black.

Two little Black girls were right to believe that death could
come to them from a policeman's gun or club in the midst
of their songs about Freedom.