"In the eyes of a child you will see." -- John Lodge
Elizabeth Partridge prefaces the first chapter of MARCHING FOR FREEDOM with a series of four photographs that chronicle the July 8, 1964 arrest of young Samuel Newall. The series begins with Samuel standing alone in front of the Dallas County Courthouse in Selma, Alabama. He is quietly holding up a handwritten poster board sign that reads: "One Man One Vote Freedom Register Now SNCC" The photographs record the approach of deputies and the arrest of the young black child for quietly holding up the voting rights poster. Samuel Newall appears in the photos to be around nine or ten years old.
"Across the United States, people were shocked that Dr. King encouraged children to join in the civil rights struggle. 'A hundred times I have been asked,' he said, 'why we have allowed children to march in demonstrations, to freeze and suffer in jails, to be exposed to bullets and dynamite. The answer is simple. Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of our lives. If we can end an incessant torture by an single climactic confrontation, the risks are acceptable.'"
While Samuel Newall was getting arrested in Selma in the summer of 1964 for quietly holding a voting rights protest sign aloft, I was a nine-year-old spending the summer flipping baseball cards, riding my banana bike, playing kickball in the street, swimming at the beach, listening to the Beatles, reading Beverly Cleary, Walter Brooks, and the Sunday funnies, and regularly experiencing feelings of confusion and discomfort over the films running on the nightly newscasts of violence being perpetrated against Civil Rights protesters in the South. I was an attentive student -- both at school and at catechism -- and what I was seeing on TV just did not make sense given what I was being taught. What was it that I was missing?
I stare at these photos of Samuel Newall, a black kid in Alabama dressed in an outfit so similar to those I wore as a child on Long Island, and I think about how easily, by virtue of birth, I could have been him.
"'Don't worry about your children,' Dr. King had reassured parents. 'Don't hold them back if they want to go to jail.' He was in awe of their willingness and bravery. 'They are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all of mankind. They are carving a tunnel of hope through the great mountain of despair.'"
Chronicling in word and in image the brutal and sometimes deadly events in early 1965 that led to the Selma march and to the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Elizabeth Partridge focuses MARCHING FOR FREEDOM on the role of children participating in the Civil Rights movement. The author sought out members of my generation who were children at the center of the action during those tumultuous and tragic days when peacefully protesting Americans were arrested and sometimes murdered at the hands of racist mobs and Southern white cops. It is powerful to hear recollections of now-grownup-kids who actually can be seen in the forty-four year old photographs that Partridge has selected for the book -- photos that visually immerse readers in the spirit of the Civil Rights movement.
A fact that is emphasized again and again by these photos is that the local churches played a pivotal role in the movement. We repeatedly see the young people either singing or listening intently inside, or standing outside their churches. We read how the marchers would retreat, oftentimes bleeding, to the sanctuary of a church.
Count me as one of my generation who grew up to reject the dictates of the church in which I was raised just as surely as I rejected my father's politics. I was content to grow up and leave both of their houses. Contemplating the significant and positive role that these churches clearly played in the lives of these young people in the Civil Rights movement has me wondering about what my children's generation may have lost out on as a result of the widespread disaffection that has caused so many of my generation to reject traditional religious institutions and raise our children without benefit of the community engendered by those churches.
"Oh freedom
Oh freedom
Oh freedom over me!
And before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free"
Another reoccurring focus of Partridge's work are the songs of the movement that were being sung inside and outside of those churches. The author asked of those she interviewed about the songs that gave meaning to their struggle, and space amidst the text is provided for samples of those songs.
"'It's the good times that make you cry,' Charles told me. 'Not the bad times. You've seen something be accomplished and it really is heart-rending.'"
The times have been really good lately. I've cried a lot over the past year as I did what I could to help Barack Obama -- who was a little boy of color living in Hawaii while the events in 1965 Alabama were transpiring -- change the course of American history. For the little boy still inside of me who could not wrap his mind around the variance between what was being taught in school about the freedoms supposedly enjoyed by Americans, in catechism about the teachings and example set by Jesus, and the state-sanctioned violence that was brought into our Long Island living room on the evening news, MARCHING FOR FREEDOM does a stellar job -- visually and textually -- of helping make sense of what was taking place in those troubled times.
Through it, young readers should come to recognize that the most important part of becoming an adult in America is having the right and obligation of making informed choices at the ballot box. In my lifetime, and for my peers, people died to secure that sacred right.
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