“THE GOOD FREEDOM.” An interview with Joanne Bland.

This is the first part of a two-part interview with Joanne Bland, a native of Selma, AL, participant in the Selma-to-Montgomery marches in 1965, co-founder of the National Voting Rights Museum, and life-long activist for civil and human rights.

Joanne Bland didn’t know she was black until she was eight years old. Rather, she didn’t know what being black in Selma, Alabama in the early 1960’s meant until then.

She was in a department store with her grandmother and tried on a pair of shoes meant only for white feet. Her grandmother immediately chastised her, unleashing a strict fury the young girl had only seen a few times before.

The store’s clerk walked up to her grandmother and said, “You’ve got to buy these shoes.” They weren’t the right size, so the elder Bland showed the clerk a string she’d used to measure her granddaughter’s feet. “If you get this size, I’ll gladly pay for them,” she said.

“You don’t understand,” the clerk replied. “You have to buy these because that nigger put her foot in it.”

Later that year, Ms. Bland was arrested for the first time. Again, she was with her grandmother, only this time the rule-breaking was more deliberate. Her grandmother had joined a group of women on a trip to the Dallas County Courthouse to register to vote. In Alabama in 1961, black people were still being lynched for that.

The women — and the children they brought with them, some of them infants — were quickly arrested and herded on to buses to the city jail, a building Ms. Bland had been taught all her young life to fear. She remembers playing with the other children on the floor of their jail cell. She doesn’t remember how long they were held, just that it felt like a very long time.

Four years later, on March 7th, 1965, Ms. Bland stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and saw police officers mounted on horses the size of Plymouths, hunting and beating her friends and neighbors with clubs as canisters of tear gas bloomed like hateful clouds across the pavement.

Fleeing the chaos of what would later be called Bloody Sunday in the back of a car, Ms. Bland rested her head in her older sister Linda’s lap. She thought the wetness dripping down onto her cheek was Linda’s tears. It was her sister’s blood, seeping from wounds in her head that would need 26 stitches.

This was Joanne Bland’s childhood. This was growing up black in Selma.

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Driving the 54-mile stretch from Montgomery to Selma along US-80 (also known as the Selma-Montgomery National Historic Trail), I felt the sense of history in reverse.

Passing over gently sloping hills, through sun-dappled farmland and the occasional shuttered strip mall, I drove my rental car in silence down the four-lane highway and tried to imagine the whole sequence of events rewound: 25,000 pairs of feet walking backwards from the capitol building in Montgomery back to Selma.

They held hands with their palms facing the wrong side out, sang hymns and spirituals starting at the end (“overcome shall we…”) and their numbers slowly dwindled with each passing step, until they were left with the original 500 marchers slowly lumbering their way past the national guard troops and white faces painted red with anger at the mouth of the Edmund Pettus Bridge all the way back to the chapel at Brown A.M.E.

Why this bizarre image popped into my head eluded me. Perhaps it was simply the result of starting my journey at the end rather than the beginning. Perhaps it was my attempt to centralize the events of 53 years ago in my mind, to provide myself a context.

Or perhaps it was the endless parade of campaign signs dotting the highway — extolling the virtues of the nearly all-white, all-male candidates running for various Alabamian offices in 2018 — that made me wonder what progress had been made since Dr. King led thousands of people along that same road half a century ago.

Perhaps that was why I was going to Selma to interview Joanne Bland in the first place. This hallowed place — full of memory, of pain, of history with all of its jagged edges — had served as a crucible for the Civil Rights Movement in the 60’s and remained now as a site of remembrance, like a battlefield from some long-ago war. I was going to find out where we’ve been and how far — if at all — we’ve come.

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Joanne Bland’s voice is transfixing — a low, soft mixture of breath and gravel. She speaks with a pleasant, Alabama drawl, curling her L’s and W’s around her tongue with deliberate ease. Her voice catches frequently as she speaks, almost as if the words got caught in her throat for a moment before being released into the air.

She is a broad woman with close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair. Her wide, infectious smile spreads across her broad face with effortless regularity. Her deep-set eyes are a warm brown.

It’s a cool, Monday morning in early spring, the air still clinging to the last breaths of winter. Ms. Bland had agreed to meet with me on the second floor of the Selma Interpretive Center, a handsome white-and-brown building on the corner of Broad Street and Water Avenue, just across the street from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

She uses the building as a headquarters of sorts, the starting point for her “Journeys of the Soul,” the personalized walking tours she offers year-round to Selma visitors hoping to learn more about the city’s place in history.

The bridge is in full view from the window just over Ms. Bland’s shoulder as we talk, as she tells me the story of her life and of the violence that occurred on that very bridge 53 years before.

In this first part of our interview, Ms. Bland recounts her upbringing as a child in the segregated South and the arrival of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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What was it like for you to grow up in this town as a young woman?

“As a young woman? As a child.”

As a child.

“As a child growing up under segregation it was nothing nice but I didn’t know it. I wasn’t so aware of it until I became involved, I guess. When the movement started. Because growing up as a child your parents shelter you from this craziness so you don’t see it. Everybody around me loved me and everybody around me looked like me. It was only when I left that area that I loved that I encountered craziness and, uh, there were some incidents that when I was growing up that really called attention to it, cause at 64 I still remember them.

Such as trying on shoes in a store and didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to. Um. And my grandmother just going crazy, just shaking me, yelling at me, telling me not to do that, stay at her side. But while she was chastising me the sales clerk was picking up the shoes and she brought them to Grandmother and she said, ‘Here.’ And my grandmother said ‘Those are not her size.’ And she pulled a string from her pocket that she had measured my foot with and said ‘If you get this size, I’ll gladly pay for them.’ And the lady said, ‘You don’t understand. You have to buy these because that nigger put her foot in it.’

Incidents like those really made me realize there was a different world out there but the awareness of it — It’s only when I started talking about this particular movement — maybe 30 years ago, when I did it almost on a daily basis — that I started to realize all the stuff I had internalized. Growing up black in America was not a good time then.”

What did you parents do?

“My mother died when I was three years old. She needed a blood transfusion and the white hospital didn’t have it and it needed to be ordered from Birmingham and sent on the bus, but by the time it got here it was too late. But, my grandmother and my dad reared us. My grandmother — my mom’s mom — came back from Detroit and stayed to help my daddy rear us. Grandma was the biggest influence in life. My dad drove cabs all my life here in Selma.”

What was he like?

“He was amazing. Of course my daddy could move mountains. He was a hard-working man who had that independence that blacks didn’t have then because he worked for himself, not white people. So they didn’t have that hold on him that most blacks in Selma that worked for the whites had. My dad was not the one who encouraged us to go, to participate. My grandmother was the one who participated AND encouraged us to go. It was only after the beating on the bridge that my dad became involved because it’s something about your child being beat up that makes you want to hurt people. After Bloody Sunday, my dad became involved and encouraged us to be involved.”

How many brothers and sisters did you have?

“I have one brother and four sisters. I’m the baby girl and then the boy.”

What was it like being one of the youngest in such a big family?

“I loved my life. I still do — I still play those same games on them and they fall for it, as old as they all are now. Um, my older sister, Sadie, is part of the second family. Her father and my father are the same father, but we had different mothers. I play her all the time — where is this gonna go, cause I don’t want her to hear that (laughs). I play her all the time. My sister Linda is the nurturer of the family. And my sister Jackie, who Jackie sort of got pushed in the middle of us and always had to fight to be noticed. And since I was the baby girl I got a lot of attention and my brother did too.”

What was Selma like back then? Was there a black side of town and a white side of town?

“Of course there was. You are in a Southern town, a small Southern town. The west side was white and the east side was black. It still remains predominantly that way now. That most of the whites in Selma live on the west side and very few, if any, live on the east side.”

How big a town was it back then?

“About 30–35 thousand. And always predominantly African-American.”

How about now?

“Still predominantly African-American. About 75 percent. Now we’re about twenty thousand. There was mass white flight maybe three or four times. When issues come up, it seems white people don’t want to compromise and make the system better for everybody. They want it to remain the status quo where they can feel superior and we feel inferior.”

So they head out of town.

“Yeah. And we follow them. I don’t know when they’re gonna realize there’s no place to go that we aren’t going (laughs).”

So you became active in the Civil Rights Movement when you were very young.

“Well, my earliest memory was actually eight. My earliest memory is at eight and getting arrested with my grandmother and some other women at the courthouse. They went to try to register to vote. I think the courthouse was open only on certain days then and they formed and they took their babies with them. I was with Grandma. We were up on the steps, the Alabama side of the courthouse was the Colored entrance, right? So I remember standing there and I hear this — and I turn around and there are buses there. And I’m excited because I knew they were gonna put us on those buses and I had never ridden a school bus and I was excited. I wanted to sit by the window, but we only rode two blocks to the city jail.

And, the city jail — the building was used to intimidate us. Grandma would say, ‘If you don’t act right, I’m gonna send you in there and that’s the jail.’ So the jail held fear for us. So I saw it and I asked Grandma, ‘Why are we here?’ And she said ‘They are gonna arrest us.’ So I started crying because I didn’t want to go in there, even if I was with Grandma. And she said ‘Don’t worry baby, things are gonna change.’ Well they did. But we still had to go in. I was not the youngest, there were arm babies there — women holding their babies. I remember playing with the other children on the floor. I know it wasn’t overnight. I’m pretty sure of that but… then they let us out. We went home and I didn’t want to do that again. That was scary.”

But you kept –

“Wherever excitement is, that’s where children are. I grew up in what became the center of the Movement, right? The other church our grandmother would take us to was our other AME church, which was Ward Chapel. It was deeply involved even before Brown Chapel. So we were going to mass meetings. When Dr. King came in ’65, the movement moved to Brown Chapel. Of course, I grew up in Brown Chapel so wherever excitement is that’s where I was. Also, my sisters had to take me wherever they went because they were my babysitters, ’cause Grandmother worked.”

What did you grandmother do?

“She was a maid in the homes of her oppressors.”

So, Dr. King first came here in ’65. What was that like, when he came to town?

“Excitement. We were all excited Dr. King was coming and the church was packed because he had that reputation for movements. The bus boycott — he had already been in Birmingham and now he had come to Selma. I know now he chose Selma because it had already been organized. The Dallas County Voters League was formed in the 1930’s and Dr. King — I don’t know any movement that he was in that had not already been organized by local people and had done ground work that he came in at the right time to make it happen.”

What was he like to see in person?

“You know, strangely enough, I don’t remember his voice as we remember it today. They way it sounds — I like it! It makes me want to get up and say the words. But, I remember things like him being kind to children. I could get to him more than adults could because he liked children, he always had a peppermint. And his hands were the softest hands I’d ever felt. Of course, when I got older I realized he had done no manual labor so his hands should have been soft! (laughs).

But because he was revered by everybody else, we revered him too. He was like a star. All the excitement would come. You know, my dad would get excited when Dr. King came to Selma. He didn’t come that much, now, between August and January — contrary to popular belief. Our history is written like Dr. King was here every day saying ‘You go here and you go there.’ No, no. This movement was primarily fought by local people.”

What were the conversations like going around town during all of this?

“I remember going to see Dr. King — I think it was the first time — and my grandmother sent my sister, Linda, home. Linda came back home and said, ‘Grandma said get ready, we’re going to see King.’ And we were all excited about going to see King, right? Linda said, ‘Grandma said put on your Sunday clothes.’ So, normally we’d fight even on Sunday not to put on Sunday clothes. But that day we wanted to see King so we didn’t have any trouble getting dressed. But when we left the house we went to a church — I think it was…it might have been Tab [Selma Tabernacle Church of God], it might have been Brown Chapel. We come there, and it is packed — people are everywhere, right? And we find Grandma in the crowd and I think my brother sat on her lap, I sat on somebody else’s lap and my other sisters had to stand.

So, preacher after preacher after preacher… psalm after psalm after psalm. Oh, I don’t know how we stayed awake — the only reason we stayed awake was because we were gonna see King, right? Well. Soon it was over. And we’re walking out and we’re all so disappointed. We’re like, ‘Grandma, what happened to King?’ She said, ‘That was Dr. King, that last speaker that spoke.’ (laughs). We were so disappointed because our favorite morning show — it was a show that came on Saturday mornings called ‘Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.’ He had a German shepherd called King. So we thought we were gonna see the dog! (laughs) I was not happy. Dr. King had to work his way into my graces, ’cause I was so disappointed that it was a man and not the dog. We were not happy, trust me.”

You were so young when all this was going on, did you know that what was happening around you was important?

“As a child, even today I zero in on stuff that I don’t understand by relating something to me. Like when the basketball players stopped wearing those little tight shorts, I stopped watching (laughs). It was the same with the movement.

There’s a drug store right down the street, Carter’s drug store. It had a lunch counter, and I wanted to sit at the lunch counter and my grandmother told me ‘When we get our freedom’ — because they kept talking about this ‘freedom’ and the only freedom I could really understand was the one Abraham Lincoln had signed on with the Emancipation Proclamation. So, I thought they didn’t know it — that the Emancipation had been signed cause they were dumb, old people (laughs)!

But, Grandmother told me that when we got our freedom, I could sit at that counter and I became a freedom fighter that day (laughs). I wanted to sit at that counter. So, then I understood that it was a different freedom that they were trying to get, not the same freedom that Abraham Lincoln was trying to give them. It was a different freedom — the good one, the good freedom. So, I started going down to the church and paying attention and, um, trying to fight for my freedom, too. Cause I wanted to sit at that counter.”

It’s interesting to think of freedom as not some large, abstract idea but as something as small as wanting to eat lunch wherever you want.

“Choice. That’s what the movement was about. Choice.”

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