Reflections of ‘Bloody Sunday’ from the daughters of a foot soldier

John Pearlie Pettaway, who was nearly caught 
up in the melee on ‘Bloody Sunday,’ and his 
daughter, Cheryl Pettaway Colvin. (Photo
courtesy of the Pettaway family) 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second installment of a two-part series on the life and legacy of John Pearlie Pettaway.

 

MEMPHIS, TN – On March 7, 1965, pandemonium swept across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. From John Pearlie Pettaway’s vantage point at the foot of the bridge, he could see a horde of people scattering in fear and trepidation.

“Dad never got to cross the bridge that day,” said Cheryl Pettaway Colvin, recalling the fury that her father described on that fateful day. “As he was standing at the foot of the bridge, he said he saw people at the top turning in slow motion.” 

Colvin illustrated the horrid scene based on her father’s recollection. “He said it was almost the way it looks in a hunter’s eyes when one shoots into a pack of birds. They ripple off to avoid being shot.”

Fearing the worst, Pettaway broke and ran. “He always told the story that he and his friend, Dan Jones, out-ran everybody,” said Brenda Pettaway Henderson, the oldest of Pettaway and Jeanette James Pettaway’s four children.

Henderson was on the scene near the bridge. At 15, she was actively involved in the movement and marching with the adults. “All I could think about was getting home,” she said. “I was not going to the church, because you didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Returning to Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where marchers had begun their trek, wasn’t Henderson’s first thought. So, she ran and kept running. “Everywhere you went you heard sirens. I was scared,” she said unabashedly. “The church was a safe place, but home was safer.”

Pettaway finally made it home to the George Washington Carver housing projects, where the Pettaway family and other civil rights leaders and marchers lived. “He said, ‘We got to get your mom,’” who was working at The Walton Theater. “So, he went and got my brother and my two sisters.”

When Pettaway returned home with his wife and children, he exited the car and encountered burly state troopers on horseback. “He (state trooper) pulled that horse in front of my dad and that horse reared,” Henderson said.

The brute size of the white man straddling a huge horse frightened Henderson. She thought he was going to beat them. “We’re just trying to get to the house,” she remembered her father telling the state trooper. “I remember him (state trooper) saying, ‘You better get there fast! Right now! And you better not come back out!’”

 What transpired on that day in Selma was echoed around the world, etched in the annals of American history, and seared into the consciousness of the surviving foot soldiers. Known as “Bloody Sunday,” that day was absolute mayhem.

The Civil Rights Movement also yielded innumerable arrests. But Pettaway, Henderson said, was never arrested. But she was arrested once, taken by patty wagon to a detention site, and released after 12 hours. 

Henderson contends that detention was a horrible experience for some detainees. “Girls were actually raped in those jails,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Boys were raped too,” Colvin added. “I had the opportunity to interview people in Marion, Ala., who had been raped. Many people didn’t want their names mentioned. They didn’t want that over their heads.”

When Colvin moved back to Selma after a stint elsewhere, she learned more about her father as his caregiver. “I got to understand why he did certain things,” she said. “He said I was different — not in an admirable way.”

Colvin loves farming, riding horses, the outdoors, and once sheared sheep. Her father, she said, abhorred that life. “He didn’t want his children to ever become farmers. He wanted all of us in school to get an education.”

 

Both Henderson and Colvin did just that.

 

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