Selma's foot soldiers retrace their steps

      Selma, Ala. was a bastion of deep-seated racism as the eyes of the world watched state troopers unleash a violent fury on voting-rights marchers on March 7th, 1965. Annie Pearl Avery and Warren Harrison were there, fighting on two different fronts.

      The 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” drew Avery and Harris back to Selma, placing them among tens of thousands committed to commemorating that fateful day. Their foot-soldier stories conjure images of a sordid era and yield lessons for a more promising future.

Fighting back…

      Annie Pearl Avery was shy of 21 and sitting in jail in 1965 when Alabama state troopers clubbed, trampled and tear-gassed 600 civil rights demonstrators attempting to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., to the state capitol in Montgomery 54 miles away.

      A mangled mess of bloody human wreckage on U.S. Route 80 signaled just how tough the road would be en route to securing voting rights. Avery had incurred the wrath of the state troopers as well and even scrapped with one of them, she said.

Annie Pearl Avery talks about her experience in Selma 1965.

       “I was arrested that day. Me and the police officer had a physical disagreement,” said Avery, who sat along the same route telling her story and selling T-shirts and other paraphernalia to visitors who journeyed to Selma to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

      Some details are sketchy, said Avery, recalling the tussle that got her arrested and the minor wounds she sustained while fighting back.

      “I was a moving target,” she said. “You can’t seriously hurt a moving target.”

      After Avery was carted off to jail, hell was unleashed on the bridge. Battered bodies lay helpless and strewn on the pavement while others sprinted to avoid the rage.

      One of those battered bodies was identified as 54-year-old Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson, an activist who helped to organize the local Selma Voting Rights Movement. Boynton lay unconscious after the melee while the world watched in horror.

      Fifty years later, the world’s eyes were back on Boynton, 104, “the original foot soldier.” She returned to Selma in a wheelchair to commemorate that moment in history with other foot soldiers, the sea of marchers and President Barack Obama on Saturday (March 7th).

      As Boynton and others were being savagely beaten on that frightful day in 1965, Avery was unaware that lives were hanging in the balance.

      “I didn’t know they were beating people until I got out of jail,” said Avery, who was the project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Hale County, Ala.

      After spending nearly hours locked up in Selma, Avery moved on to challenge the status quo in other cities.

      “I can’t remember the exact number of times I got arrested,” she said. “But I remember I was arrested in Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Gaston, Ala.”

      In Danville, Va., for example, Avery spent 90 days in jail for contempt of court. She fasted the entire time, she said.

      Although Avery forged ahead during the civil rights movement, she looked back over that part of her life during the commemorative anniversary and acknowledged that she was afraid.

      “I was always scared,” she said. “But the thing about fear is once you make the decision to do something, fear dissipates. You just have to make up your mind that you will accept the consequences.”

Activism by bus…

      Warren Harrison’s mind is sharp, but his body is frail. That didn’t stop the 92-year-old from rolling his scooter through the thick crowd with his oxygen tank on the back and over-the-ear nasal cannulas attached to his nose.

      On the side of Harrison’s scooter was a sign that read: “It’s A Privilege PLEASE Vote.” That message was underscored in Selma in 1965 and other parts of the segregated South where African Americans were denied the right to vote.

      The carnage of Bloody Sunday unfolded before Harrison on a television screen. The next day he was in Selma trying to make a difference.

Warren Harrison transported demonstrators during the
tumultuous civil rights movement.

      “I saw that the marchers were badly beaten and needed blood. So I donated my blood,” said Harrison, who’d left Detroit to assist the injured demonstrators.

      When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a third march, Harrison was still in Selma and answered the call. He marched with hundreds to the state house in Montgomery to assert his right to vote, braving the peril of trying to secure it.

      Fifty years later, Harrison is still concerned about civil rights and human rights. The commemoration, he said, meant he needed to be in Selma.

      On Saturday (March 7th), Harrison got a chance to shake President Obama’s hand and got two hugs from first lady Michelle Obama. The next day, his great niece, Leslie Clapp, spotted Amelia Platts Boynton Robinson on the bridge in the crowd.

      “I want to say hello to her,” Harrison told his great niece.

      Clapp made it happen.

      “He jumped off the scooter to meet her,” she said. “They held hands for a moment in the middle of the bridge.”

      Born in Selma, Harrison moved to Detroit at the age of 10 to live with an older brother – a decision made necessary after he got into a disagreement with a white man after an encounter with the man’s son. He was more than willing to tell that story and others, but preferred talking about the civil rights movement instead.

      A coast-to-coast bus driver, Harrison bused civil rights demonstrators all over the country. He drove them to the March on Washington, the Albany Movement in Albany, Ga., Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., back and forth to Selma, and other places when transportation was needed.

      He even shuttered the entourage of five U.S. presidents. He stopped driving a decade ago and now lives in Southfield, Mich., where he is an active member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

      “This trip to Selma,” said Harrison, “has added years to my life.”

LEGACY: McCann Leronius Reid

      When the clarion was sounded during the civil rights movement for freedom and justice, a young journalist and photographer answered the call – McCann Leronius Reid. He would capture the movement and its aftermath through the lens of his camera and during his stint as editor of the Tri-State Defender.   

      Reid embedded himself in the movement during some of its most pivotal moments and recalled his experiences long after it had ended. After serving more than a dozen years at the newspaper, he continued sounding off as a contributing writer well into the 1980s on issues germane to African Americans.

      The sound of Reid’s voice, however, would eventually fade, and his film camera, now a relic of the past, would no longer capture the spirit of a people determined to break down barriers and overcome racism and injustices.

McCann Leronius Reid

      Reid died Sept. 20 at the Memphis VA Medical Center. He was 90. Relatives, friends and admirers bid him farewell on Sept. 29th during his funeral at Longview Heights Seventh-Day Adventist Church, where he was a member.

      Reid had been in ill health at a private nursing home receiving special care, his wife, Cora Reid, said. She’d hoped to move him to Nashville with her to live with their daughter, Angela Kim Reid-Thompson, director of rehabilitation at Nashville Community Care and Rehabilitation at Bordeaux.

      Though Reid could not join his wife and daughter, the two hold fond memories of a husband and father who lived life to the fullest and left behind an invaluable legacy and an indelible impression on those he’d encountered.

      “I wasn’t too much aware of what was going on at that time until years later,” said Cora Reid, a retired Memphis City Schools teacher. “Then I realized how important of a person my husband was in the civil rights movement.”

      What she remembers most was that her husband was away from home a lot, somewhere recording history as a journalist and photographer. “It didn’t dawn on me…but he contributed a lot to the civil rights movement,” she said. “[But] I don’t know whether I felt the danger until years later.”

      Reid happened to be in the right places and at the right time as an eyewitness to history, she said. He met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when they were students at Boston University. Dr. King would go on to lead a “movement” and Reid would become an active participant and eventually document it. 

      For example, as a journalist, Reid put pen to paper and created a narrative detailing the African-American struggle. As a photographer, he captured the heart and soul of those in the trenches and others on the front line for justice. Then he transfixed it all for posterity.

      Reid participated in a number of marches and documented his experiences, including the march that drew Dr. King to Memphis to demand better working conditions for the city’s sanitation workers.  

      “My father had a lot of integrity,” Reid-Thompson said. “The way he lived was in support and alignment with nonviolence. His writing was a statement, his voice. He allowed his pen to be the power.”

      Reid-Thompson also remembers her father as a quiet, gentle man with a wit humor. “He was very unassuming, but a renaissance man,” she noted.

      Audrey McGhee, the former publisher of the TSD, also remembers Reid as being “quiet and unassuming.” What she remembers most, however, was that he was dedicated and devoted to his job and “always on top of things.”

      Though Reid had left the newspaper before McGhee’s tenure as publisher, he’d followed a succession of editors, such as Lewis O. Swingler and Alex Wilson, who challenged the status quo by using the press to affect change.

      Reid’s voice was succinct, deliberate, and he used it to get his point across. He also voiced his concerns about segregated conditions. And when restaurants were desegregating, he and William “Bill” Little, TSD’s sports writer, decided they’d test the law by making an entrance.

      Not willing to bend under the weight of racism and discrimination, Reid filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that the Memphis Press Scimitar and The Commercial Appeal refused to hire him because of his race and religion.

      Reid eventually found employment at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where he served as editor of the E.E.O.C.’s union paper. He continued to ply his skills as a journalist and later spent his golden years with his family.

      Cora Reid said she doesn’t have a lot of her husband’s work, but “I do have some of his most important photos.”

Authors – and their works – speak to ASALH mission

Toussaint Louverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman are familiar iconic symbols of heroism whose struggle in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean helped to change the status quo of their day: racism and slavery.

     Celeste-Marie Bernier, the Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis, traces the lives and histories of these six men and women in her book, “Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination.”

Dr. Earnest Jenkins (seated left), associate professor of art history
at the University of Memphis, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, the Dorothy
K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the university.

Currently on leave as professor of African American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, Bernier was among dozens of authors showcasing their literary works at the 99th Annual Association for the Study of African American Life and History Convention (ASALH).

     The four-day convention at the Peabody Hotel, Sept. 24-28, drew a smorgasbord of authors locally and nationally, including Circuit Court Judge D’Army Bailey, who autographed copies of his books, “The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern Civil Rights Activist’s Journey, 1959-1964” and “Mine Eyes Have Seen: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Journey.”

     Although the theme of ASALH was “Civil Rights in America,” the number of authors and their scholarly works were particularly broad-based, noteworthy, and coincided with the bevy of academics, government officials, community leaders and activists in attendance.

     The struggle for civil rights and the residual effects of slavery were duly noted in many of the authors’ works and also among the vendors who stocked their booths with artifacts, art, African clothing, and educational material that was reflective of ASALH’s mission.

     The mission is “to promote, research, preserve, interpret and disseminate information about Black life, history and culture to the global community.”

People aren’t telling the story…

Bernier’s work is representative of ASALH’s mission. She researches and writes extensively about racism, inequalities and slavery from the vantage point of a white Briton. There is very little difference between racism, inequalities and slavery in the United States, she said, and racism, inequalities and slavery in Great Britain.


“The big issue in Britain is empire and maniacal, aristocratic inequalities,” Bernier explained. “Growing up there as a kid I learned about slavery through people trading…and slavery was a word that was never used. So we have forces of amnesia that are still very powerful.

     “Currently, governmental practices are to remove references to black British history in favor of mythologizing a white Briton,” she said, “because, it suits current ideas around immigration and conservative policies and racists practices.

     “One of the most powerful experiences has been understanding black British histories and how fascinated black British performers and musicians are with African American histories. So many of them will ask me questions about what I know about African American life and culture.”

     Bernier’s assorted transatlantic experiences and scholarship drew her to Memphis and, of course, the ASALH convention.

     “One of the most powerful things about being in Memphis is teaching courses and research that I do about slavery… (The) city very much has a long history, and a powerful history, not only in terms of social, political, legal issues about slavery, but also music, art, photography.

     “I grew up in a French, Canadian, Irish community. When my mom was dying, she wanted to read Harry Jacob. She didn’t want to read the great white British classics,” Bernier said. “So that notion of understanding poverty and class and nationhood, I was very careful to let people know how I came to this story, why I’m interested, and what it is that I’m trying to do.” 


People aren’t telling the story, she said.

‘Repositories of ongoing history…’

During a mid-day luncheon at the convention, Bailey – lawyer, judge, civil rights activist, actor and author – relayed his experiences growing up in Memphis, participating in the sit-in movement in Louisiana, becoming a black radical and birthing the National Civil Rights Museum

     While “The Education of a Black Radical” encapsulates Bailey’s collective experiences in the civil rights movement in the ‘60s, the book “Mine Eyes Have Seen” is mostly pictorial. Both books, however, trace the author’s journey during that turbulent era.

     An avid reader, Bailey also has a penchant for writing. The world he grew up in and the struggle to overcome the vestiges of Jim Crow laws and the racist practices of its perpetrators is now fodder for his books and lectures.  

     Bailey is telling his own story, which made him the man he is today. And he is not willing to yield that narrative to someone else. The ASALH convention was important to him for that reason, he said, and also because it served as a disseminator of “information about black life, history and culture.”

     “These things are about connections and getting to know people and people getting to know you,” said Bailey. “It’s a chance to talk to people who’re interested in works of history and stories about struggles.”

     The written word is important and books can be “repositories of ongoing history,” Bailey said. For this reason, the authors book signing and the various panel discussions was the underpinning for the ASALH convention.

     “There’s a different breed of people who buy books…hold them…and read the pages,” Bailey said. “It’s more than what the information is in it. It’s an experience when you make the commitment to read a book. The important thing is understanding how the written word can be used to communicate.”

The hunt for Ernest Withers’ informant files

The body of work that the late Ernest C. Withers had amassed during his ennobled career as a civil rights photographer brought him a measure of fame, and suspicion, too, after the news broke in 2010 that he secretly supplied the FBI with information and photographs of stakeholders in the movement.

On Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2012, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a response to a lawsuit filed by The Commercial Appeal, which broke the story, “officially confirmed” that Withers had been informant ME 338-R.

The judge’s ruling came 14 months after the newspaper filed a suit against the FBI in November 2010 in hopes of forcing the FBI to release Withers’ informant files. The government still hasn’t confirmed whether Withers was a paid informant or not.

The initial report and repeated coverage of Withers’ suspected clandestine involvement with the FBI, from at least 1968 to 1970, produced a shockwave that reverberated around the world. In this latest episode of the newspaper’s hunt for Withers’ FBI files, the judge’s ruling barely registers on the Richter scale. Does anybody care?

Withers is still viewed by many as the kingpin of civil rights photography. The recent revelation, however, has done little to diminish his legacy. The overwhelming consensus is that the tens of thousands of powerful images that he snapped with his film camera did more to shed light on the tumultuous era rather than the information he is suspected of supplying the FBI.

Did Withers rendezvous with the FBI or not? Jackson’s ruling did not convince Rosalind Withers-Guzman one iota that her father supplied information to the FBI. In fact, she’s resolved to build upon the legacy that he’d bequeathed his family and over one million of enduring images that he left to posterity.

“The allegations have been around for a long time. That’s no different than what was stated before,” Withers-Guzman, president and board chairman of the museum and trustee of the Ernest C. Withers Trust, said about Jackson’s ruling. Last year in February, months after the news broke, the Withers family opened the Withers Collection Museum & Gallery, 333 Beale St., to preserve the history of their father’s work.

“Whether my father was an FBI informant or not, I really don’t know,” said Withers-Guzman. “I can only look at what they investigate. The thing that is not properly represented is a major concern for me: Communicating with the FBI was a standard back then, a protocol. He was following the leadership at that time. He wasn’t trying to do something to harm the movement, which they’re alluding to.”

Withers-Guzman said she has a problem with the whole shebang. “I personally think they really want to cause disdain so that the record of work my father left behind will be tarnished,” she said. “No one has the evidence of our past more than Ernest Withers. He has 60 years of history covering five categories in an indebt way.”

Withers died in 2007 at age 85.

Withers-Guzman said she wouldn’t have known what to do “if I didn’t have the quarterback,” a reference to a Jan. 26, 2012, premiere showing of “Quarterback: A Documentary on Dr. Ernest Withers” at the museum and gallery. The short film depicts Withers’ life of work through the eye of his camera.

 Whatever is gleaned from the judge’s ruling and the newspaper’s insistence on tracking Withers’ files doesn’t negate the fact that Withers was the quintessential civil rights photographer, Withers-Guzman said, whose photos remain an integral part of history.

“They use my father’s work as a benchmark,” she said. “Our history is in black and white. And no one else has that.”