On March 14, a mural depicting civil rights events in Selma, Ala. will be dedicated one block from the Edmond Pettus Bridge, the site of 1965’s “Bloody Sunday.” The three-year project is the effort of Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past in Youngstown.
Recent Youngstown Early College graduates and current YSU students, Brittany Bailey, Lekeila Houser, Jasmine Macklin and Kira Walker, will attend the dedication with Penny Wells, executive director of Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, and board member Derrick McDowell. The delegation will leave on March 13 and return March 15.
“Sojourn to the Past has become really imbedded in the civil rights movement. And the Youngstown kids have really had an attachment to Selma,” Wells said.
Half of the $4,000 needed for the mural was raised through an anonymous local donation. The remainder came from the Youngstown community, including a Tyler Historical Center event in February where civil-rights activist Joanne Bland spoke and the documentary “After Selma” was shown.
The new mural will be located on the side of the Selma Welcoming Center on Broad Street, one block from the Edmond Pettus Bridge. It will include eight aluminum panels depicting people and events from Selma’s 1960s civil rights history. It replaces an aging mural (pictured above) which is located on a vacant building with an uncertain future. (Image via the Unitarian Universalist Association/ua.orgIn Selma, there’s an older mural on the site where the Rev. James Reeb, and two other Unitarian ministers, Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller, were attacked by whites two days after “Bloody Sunday.” Reeb later died from his injuries. The mural depicts foot soldiers walking across the Edmond Pettus Bridge, the attack on the marchers by police and state troopers, the march to Montgomery, and the signing of the Voting Rights bill by President Lyndon Johnson.
Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past students have traveled to Selma each spring as part of their journey to civil-rights sites in the South. While in Selma, they visit where Reeb was attacked. In 2017, the group noticed that the mural was deteriorating.
Wells told Bland, a veteran of “Bloody Sunday” and a lifelong civil-rights activist, that if Bland could find an artist to refurbish the mural, Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past would raise the funds to pay the artist. Bland, who is the co-founder and former director of the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, agreed.
After further investigation, the group abandoned the idea of reconditioning the mural, due to the deterioration of the vacant building where the work is located. A decision was made to create a new mural on the side of the Selma Welcoming Center on Broad Street, one block from the Edmond Pettus Bridge.
The new mural will include eight aluminum panels depicting people and events in Selma’s 1960s civil rights history, including:
• Patricia Blalock, the library director who integrated the Selma Public Library without a court order or demonstration. One morning, Blalock came to work and the library’s chairs had been removed. She gradually returned the chairs from the basement to the first floor. She also hired the first African-American librarian in Selma.
• John Lewis and Hosea Williams who led 600 local citizens across the Edmond Pettus Bridge on Sunday, March 1965. They had expected to be arrested at the event, not attacked.
• Amelia Boynton, leader of the Dallas County Voters League, who was beaten unconscious on the Edmond Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday.
• Jimmy Webb, who, when 16, led a group of teenagers to the court house steps in 1965 to pray a few days after Bloody Sunday and was confronted by a deputy sheriff, who unsuccessfully tried to intimidate them. Webb responded using the Principles of Nonviolence.
• Rev. James Reeb, the Unitarian minister who answered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for people of faith to come to Selma. He was severely beaten two days after Bloody Sunday and died several days later.
• Viola Liuzzo, who came to Selma from Detroit after Bloody Sunday. She was shuttling marchers between Montgomery and Selma in her car and was shot in the head and killed by the Ku Klux Klan.
• Passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965, which resulted in African Americans being able to register to vote for the first time.
• The 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. In March 2015, President Barack Obama walked across the Edmond Pettus Bridge with Mrs. Amelia Boynton Robinson who traveled beside him in her wheelchair. Robinson was an activist and leader of the American Civil Rights Movement in Selma and a key figure in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.
Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Youngstown. For more information, visit Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past.
