This month marks the 60th anniversary of some of the famous and momentous events in the Selma civil rights campaign of 1965. This week I want to highlight a lesser known but equally momentous event in Selma a couple of months before that helped to set the stage for the more famous events in March 1965. In early January of that year, local Black leaders Amelia Boynton and the Rev. Frederick Reese helped to organize a voting rights campaign in cooperation with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Rev. Reese was also a public high school teacher and president of the Selma Teachers Association. On January 22, 1965 he led a group of over 100 Black teachers in a march to the county courthouse in support of Black voter registration. The teachers were not allowed to enter the courthouse but were met on the steps by local law enforcement officers including the notorious Sheriff Jim Clark. The officers pushed the teachers down the steps by poking them with nightsticks. The teachers climbed the steps again and were pushed down again. Although the teachers were not able to enter the courthouse that day, their example helped to inspire others including some of their students to join the campaign in Selma. By standing up to local authorities, the teachers put both their personal safety and their careers at risk. This was the first time in the modern Civil Rights Movement that Black teachers publicly marched together in the South. The video posted below features the Rev. Frederick Reese reflecting on The Selma Teachers March of January 22, 1965.
Sixty years later, we live in a time that calls for teachers in our public schools to be courageous. They are under pressure by the federal government to conform to a version of our nation’s history that denies or minimizes the historical reality and ongoing consequences of systemic racism. A recent letter from the Department of Education to schools that receive federal funding put it this way:
Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon “systemic and structural racism” and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them—particularly during the last four years—under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (“DEI”), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.
Public schools and other educational institutions that do not comply with these distorted and erroneous portrayals of “systemic racism and DEI” are threatened with the loss of federal funding. It is important to support our courageous teachers who want to tell the truth in the face of such massive resistance. We can advocate for the current restrictions on them to be removed or modified. Our local churches are not subject to these restrictions and can be places to equip people to understand racial justice as an essential aspect of Christian discipleship and American citizenship. The writer and racial justice prophet James Baldwin summarized what is at stake in his essay “A Talk to Teachers.” The following words were written over 60 years ago but are just as necessary and powerful today:
What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would liberate not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all.