Lynda Blackmon Lowery: The Girl Who Marched America Forward

The girl that made a difference. There is nothing more precious walking on this earth than you are. You are a child of God, so hold up your head and believe in yourself. Those words are from Linda Blackman Lowry, the youngest person to march every step of the way with Martin Luther King Jr. on the march in Selma. Hi everyone, my name is Eliana Mosteller. I got to know Linda Blackman Lowry by reading her book. She signed her book called Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom with a note to me and my sister. I think that her life story is amazing. My dad even got to go to Alabama and meet her. Most of what Linda fought for was the right to vote because she thought that once her parents got the right to vote, everything would be better. She was arrested nine times before she turned 15 and she still kept going. The local leaders would plan two to three marches every day. When they held a march, the kids who were marching would go to school first to take attendance and then their teachers would let them out the back door. These teachers were always on the child's side. When the children would march, there would usually be about 50 kids that were marching alongside Linda. Before the kids set out on the march, Linda said all the adults would tell them, you're going to jail, do not fight back.

You might be pushed, you might be hit. Just turn the other cheek, do not fight back. Don't worry about it, we'll take care of you. The police would let the kids march about four or five blocks, then they would have to get on the bus. If you did not get on fast enough, you would get shot with a cattle prod. On Bloody Sunday, Linda Blackman was beaten and had to get 35 stitches. 14 days later, on March 21st, 1965, she chose to march again because she wanted to show George Wallace, the governor, what the rules he had made had done to her. She wanted him to see with his own eyes the bandages on her head from where the stitches had been and how he hurt her and the others who were beaten while marching alongside Linda. As they were marching, they sang things like, ain't gonna let nobody turn me around. I'm gonna keep on a-walkin', keep on a-talkin' and marchin' on to freedom land and we shall overcome. There were a lot of people that came out of their houses yelling hurtful things, but the guards kept them away. On the fourth day of the march, thousands of people joined them as they were getting closer and closer to Montgomery. Then, they reached Montgomery on March 25th, 1965. Linda felt awesome because she had finally done it. There were more than 25,000 people marching with Linda. She said, I learned that I was not alone,

that there were a lot of people, white as well as black, who really care about what happened to me, Linda Blackman, and to the black people of Selma, Alabama. From researching Linda Blackman Lowry, I learned that I can be a young child but still do something that will change the world. Linda's words, the Selma movement was a kid's movement. You have a voice, too, and with determination, you can be a history maker just like me. Those words, they stick with me. They inspire me to continue to speak for what I believe in. Woo! Wow. We got some toast up there. Give me something. Mm. Awesome. Mm. Oh, I feel so special. You good onward. Hello, everyone. I want you to forgive me. I'm not feeling so good today, but I figured if I came out and spoke with y'all and met some of my dear friends, that I would feel better. So we gonna go on that premise, okay? I gotta put these on, cause something's wrong with my eye and the light is bothering it.

Now I look like a movie star. I know you've been welcomed to Selma, but I want to just say welcome to my queen city. I got emotional as Ileana was reading her essay. It's, it's phenomenal to know that you inspire young people. My story often begins with before my 15th birthday I had been jailed nine times, twice in a state prison camp. You're looking at a proud and happy jailbird. Why? Because I didn't go to jail for hurting anyone. I didn't go to jail for taking anything from anyone. I went to jail for what I believed in. So what could a 14-year-old believe in so much she would go to jail that many times? My story actually starts on September the 19th, 1957. That was the day my mom died. I am the oldest of four. And I heard my grandmother and the older people saying, my mom wouldn't have died if she hadn't been colored. See, growing up in the segregated South, growing up in Selma, Alabama, even at the age of seven you knew white folks didn't like black folks and black folks didn't like white folks. But at the age of seven I found out what hate really was. White folks hated black folks so much they would let our mom die. There was an all white hospital here that had the blood that could have possibly saved my mom's life, but because they didn't have Negro blood, she couldn't get that blood. And the blood she needed had to be sent some ninety-six miles away from Birmingham by trailway bus. When the bus got to the bus station, my father was there.

He got the blood and he took it to Burwell Infirmary, which was like a modern day urgent care for black people. And he was told my mom had been dead fifteen minutes. And until he died, my father would often be sitting up looking, staring into space, thinking he's watching TV or reading the paper and he'd just say, fifteen minutes. So when I was about sixteen, I asked him what did that fifteen minutes mean? And he said, and I saw him cry for the second time in my life, he said, he was fifteen minutes too late with the blood that could have possibly saved his wife and my mother. And when I asked that question, he gave those fifteen minutes to me unknowingly. I often sit down and think about how you can build up in fifteen minutes and how you can totally destroy in fifteen minutes. But to get back to September the 19th, 1957, I made a vow at the age of seven that when I got big, I was going to change things. Nobody would ever have to grow up without a mommy again because of the color of her skin. Now I didn't know getting big meant the ripe old age of thirteen when I would first see and hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. During that time, back in those days, there was a show that came on every Saturday morning on TV that we watched called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. And Sergeant Preston had this magnificent German shepherd named King, and when grandmother told us we were going to go see King on a Saturday, and dress us up in our Sunday best, you know we knew we were going to see this German shepherd. We had decided how we was going to shake his paw, who we was going to let him save, because every Saturday morning, King saved.

He saved everybody in 24 minutes. So we were just excited. We get to Tabernacle Baptist Church, there's a lot of people up there to talk and was talking, but we were excited because we was looking around for the German shepherd. Then a man with the biggest eyes I had ever seen named Mr. James Baldwin introduced the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We were some disappointed children. We were not happy at all. So where is the German shepherd? But when Dr. King started to speak, I along with just about everybody in that church started leaning forward so we could hear what he was saying. Now I'm going to tell the truth, I didn't understand half of that stuff, but I know I wanted to do all of that stuff because he made it seem so good that it would bring change. And when he asked who was with him and the church stood up, I stood up too, because I knew then that I could make change. This man empowered me with three words. He said, you can get anybody to do anything with steady loving confrontation. Now it passed by my 13 year old ears first time he said it, but the second time he said it in a speech he said it to my spirit. He called my name. I heard him say, Linda, you can get anybody to do anything with steady loving confrontation. And I remember jumping up saying, oh yeah, that's how I'm going to do it. And my grandmother pulling me back down saying, you better sit down, you in church. Oh. But that day I didn't know what the word empowerment meant. Didn't know about empowerment for years to come.

But that day he empowered me and I have lived the next 60 years doing just that, steady loving confrontation and making change. We started being trained in the principles of nonviolence before Dr. King came by the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. That was Reverend Dr. Bernard Lafayette, the late John Lewis and others. We were being trained and I would follow this young lady named Betty Fights. Betty had and still have a voice like an angel. And Betty and I both had lost our mothers, so she kind of took me under her wings being a few years older than me. And I thought if I followed Betty, I could sing like Betty. I would learn how to sing like Betty. That didn't happen, but I carry my own tune. They would have meetings, the older kids. This is the kids from twelfth grade, Hudson High, from the Selma University and so forth, Concordia College. And they would go and sit in and do things. And Dr. Lafayette always said, I was just too little. I was small in stature. And so he wouldn't let me go marching or sitting in with them when they would be making plans. He would always send me to the store. So my name became Gopher because I always had to go for something. But I was most proud the day that I had to go for someone's mother to get them out of jail, because they were being arrested after they had set in at the Woolworths Counter. On January 2, 1965, Dr. King came to Selma, spoke at Brown Chapel, said, On tomorrow we would start going by the thousands if necessary. And yeah, I was going to go to jail.

I had been looking forward to going to jail for almost a whole year. So I was going to go to jail. As my baby said, we had to go to school, say present, or whatever federal dollars the schools got at that time. We let our teachers know what march we wanted to go on because normally there was two per day. And we found out the times of those marches the night before at the mass meetings. Our teachers, our parents, our community, and I just have to add the community was the church and the church was the community. So no matter what denomination of religious affiliation you were, we were all very good by each other. So our parents, at first they didn't, they really didn't want us, they didn't want us out there marching. But we had seen what happened in Birmingham two years before. And sixty-three, the parents march, they went to jail, they lost their jobs, then the children started marching. Ok, I'll beat it up. Then the children started marching. They went to jail, they were beaten, hosed, but they brought about the 1964 Desegregation Act. Now we had seen this and we knew if our parents marched they'd go to jail, go to jail they'd lose their jobs, lose their jobs. We knew it would break up the family unit as we knew it, much like what's happening at the borders today with parents and children. So children were seen and not heard back then. And we figured out a way where we could be seen and heard.

Our parents, our communities, everybody was with us. We would have prayer before, my grandmother would pray for us before we left the house. We would have prayer before we left the churches on the march. And a lot of times we would be in jail praying. First time I went to jail, it's funny because first couple, almost two weeks, we were not taken to jail. When we marched they would take us to this old National Guard armory, big white concrete building and make us stand. Sometimes they let us sit until it got dark and then they let us out. So first time I went to jail now, I had a clique and a crew at school. My grandmother always told me I was a born leader and I always felt that way so I always had to leave. But program, like I said, my clique and my crew were very different. So I'm in jail with some members of each. So I went there every Sunday and I was there with my family. And here I am, the leader and I'm crying the loudest. They were not allowed to leave the house. I went there every Sunday and I was like, oh no, It was the darkest night I can ever remember in my life. it's not safe, it's not safe for me. So I went there every Sunday and I was like, oh no, it's not safe, it's not safe for me. And I started crying. And a friend of mine, Ruby Brooks, came and sat down beside me and started rocking me and telling me everything was going to be all right. And I realized that there were other girls crying and other girls were sitting comforting them. And then out of this deep, dark night, this beautiful alto voice sang, we shall overcome.

That calmed my spirit. And to this day, when I overthink, underthink, not think enough, I find myself humming a singing this song. And it seemed like everything just fell into place so I can see a way out. Longest time in jail was nine days. Stay up there. We had, there had been two marches that day. And for some reason, there came a third march. So the powers that be took the first two sets of marches, boys and girls, around 150 of us together, loaded us up on school buses and drove us fifteen to twenty miles outside of Selma to a state prison camp called Camp Selma. Now we knew our parents and nobody knew where we were because this was the first time that this had happened. So we were some praying young people. We were there for three days and three times a day for three days, they gave us black eyed peas to eat. On the third day, it was getting dark and they put us on these school buses and we knew we were going home. But the ride got longer and it got darker. They took us forty miles from Selma to a place called Thomaston, Alabama, and another state prison camp called Camp Thomaston. We had prayer vigils, I'm serious, five times a day praying, because we knew, nobody knew where we were. But for six days we were there. For six days, three times a day, guess what they fed us? Black eyed peas. I was fourteen years old, I am now seventy-three. I haven't eaten a black eyed pea since I was fourteen. And get offended if I'm offended and people don't know why. But that was one way they had of like breaking your spirit.

They did not break my spirit but they broke my taste for black eyed peas. And for some reason my children love them. But after those six days they brought us home. Now during the time we was in this prison camp and they took other people to forty miles away to Camden and other prison camps around this area, Black Belt area. But while we was in this prison camp a young man named Jimmy Lee Jackson had been shot and had died here in Selma. He got shot during the night march in Marion about thirty miles from Selma. The story goes that there had been a march that day. led by one of our trainers, the Reverend James Orange. Now we call him Leader, so I'll revert back to that name. Leader had led a group of students on a march. They had been arrested. The students was let out, but Leader was kept there. And he told us that an Alabama state trooper came and threw a rope over his cell. And at the end of that rope was a noose. And that's what he had to look at all day, knowing that that would be his last day of life. So when they were having a mass meeting two blocks from the jail, and someone came in, children, someone came in and told them that they had overheard the powers that be talk about letting Leader out like 12, 1 o'clock in the morning, and the Ku Klux Klan would pick him up and they were going to kill him. So the people decided to walk the two blocks from the church to the jail, surround the jail in hopes of keeping Leader alive. They were attacked by state troopers and local law enforcement there. And this young man, Jimmy Lee Jackson, observed Alabama state trooper either attacking his mother and or eighty-two year old grandfather.

And he went to shield them and was shot twice in the stomach. He died here in Selma at the Good Samaritan Hospital on February 26, 1965. I remember that day vividly because it was the birthday of my friend Ruby. And we couldn't even be happy that day for her. The leaders of the movement decided that they were going to send, they were going to walk from Selma to Montgomery. At first they had said they were going to take Jimmy Lee's casket from Selma to Montgomery, and I knew I wasn't going to be on that march. But they changed their minds so we decided we were going to walk from Selma to Montgomery, and to my understanding it was only going to be about fifty people, although we had gathered it was about 600. We gathered on the playground next to Brown Chapel at the church services that day. We lined up to a breath. I was in the 19th row from the front. We were led by the late Congressman John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Mr. Albert Turner, and our student, our high school student leader, Charles Malden. Normally when we march, the music, the songs, just invigorated us and kept us going. This particular day, when I sung, ain't going to let nobody turn me around, I wasn't even convincing to myself. It was an eerie feeling that day, nothing you could actually put your finger on or say was wrong, but it was just a bad feeling. We, when we got to the apex, to the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and could see over the other side, there was rows and rows of Alabama. of Alabama State Troopers across the four lanes of highway.

Behind them was the Dallas County Sheriff, Jim Clark, and he had his deputies, he even had posse, men on horseback. The, there were Alabama State Troopers on horseback too. When John and Hosea got down to the front of the line to the State Troopers and asked permission to pass, we were told we were an illegal assembly. There would be no march from Selma to Montgomery that day. We had two to three minutes to disperse and go back to our homes or churches. There had been times when we had marched that we were stopped, not jailed, and we would kneel, pray, turn around, go back to church and regroup. And one of our trainers, Jimmy Webb, Jimmy was walking up and down the line saying, kneel, kneel. So from about the 18th row going back up the bridge, we started kneeling. As I was kneeling, I heard these gunshots, pop, pop, pop. And then there was this smoke coming up from the ground. It caused me not to be able to breathe and nor see. And in a real panicky mode, turned out to be tear gas. Then I felt someone grab me by the back of my collar and try to pull me out of this kneeling position. And I was resisting. So this person decided to grab my both lapels and jerk me back. And as he did, his hand came up by the only part of me that was not nonviolent, my mouth, and I bit him. And of course he called me the N word twice. And he hit me in my forehead twice. He then pushed me away. I managed to get up and started running. I started running into this cloud of tear gas.

And he was running behind me, hitting me. Until November 2nd, 2020, I always said, and even in my book, I must have passed out because when I woke up, I was on this stretcher being put in the back of a hearse. But on November 2nd, 2020, CBS News was interviewing me for a special they were doing on BET called The Boiling Point. And after the interview, the producer said he had found some archival footage of that day in their vaults. And asked me to look at it. It shows me running into this cloud of tear gas, and the sheriff's deputy running behind me, hitting me. I did not pass out. I fell down. And this Alabama state trooper kicked me so hard, I came up off the ground. Next to him was a sheriff's deputy. He had something that looked like a small baseball bat. He hit me. Next to him was another sheriff's deputy that hit and kicked me. For fifty-five years I did not know this was what happened to me. I had dealt with my demons so I thought, for fifty five years, I did not know this. And now, I'm dealing with those physical and mental scars all over again. And it is not easy. I remember the look, I could see the look on those men faces that was doing that to me. And it was the same look of arrogant privilege and hatred that Derek Chauvin had on his face when he had his knee on Mr. Floyd's neck and he looks up into this camera so arrogantly. I can still look anyone in the eye and say, I hate no one. I just like a whole lot of things y'all. And I just like some people, but I hate no one.

I mean, it's been fifty-eight years since this happened. To go back as a fourteen-year-old and relive all that junk is hard. I worked in mental health for thirty-seven years. I walked around for forty-plus years with post-traumatic stress syndrome and didn't even know it. But I could tell you what to do with yours. If it had not been for my sister Joanne Bland, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now. I never would have wrote a book. Oh the book is a play y'all. But I never would have talked about it because anybody's sense in any demonstration, as far as I'm concerned, deserved the blatant brutality we received. That's why when I talk, I ask people to look inside themselves because we need to put the word human back in the word humanity. And it's going to have to start with us, how much we're willing to do, how far we're willing to go. You know, but make a long story short of it. On the eighteenth of March, my name Linda Blackmon became the youngest name at age fourteen on the official list of three hundred that were allowed to walk from Selma to Montgomery. On the second day of that march, I turned fifteen years old, gosh you couldn't tell me nothing. I woke up, walked out of the tent that morning and I focused on these three national guardsmen. See, the president, President Johnson, had federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect us. He had also sent regular army to help them. So I focused on these three guardsmen. They were standing by their jeep, guns at their waists, bayonets at the end

of the. guns, they looked like they were looking directly at me. And all of a sudden I started thinking, there was nobody my color out there beating me two weeks ago. And there's nobody my color out here protecting me two weeks later. And they were there to finish the job they had started. I ran back in the tent screaming, please don't let them kill me, please don't let them kill me. And they were the first three people that came running in the tent. The march that day started a whole hour late, all because of yours truly. There were some wise women that was going to send me back home, but they wasn't going to send me back as terrified as I was. So they said a whole lot of things, of which I remember none. But I remember this one guy, a white guy named Jim Lethra. Jim had lost a leg in a war and he was walking the 54 miles on crutches. Jim said, before he let anyone else harm another hair on my head, he would lay down and die for me. Now being the little 15-year-old smart-alecky child, I was tempted to say show me, but all I could hear was my grandmother in my head. I'm not raising any quitters. You know you start something, you have to take it to the end. No matter the outcome, I'm not raising any quitters. How can you let somebody do something for you that you're not willing to do for yourself? Where are you now? I mean she was in my head, if I had known what schizophrenia was, I would have said she was making me schizophrenic. But she was in my head just talking. And there were people that were there that was just lifting me up.

So Jim and I decided we was going to walk the first leg that day together. And we went down the highway singing. Ain't going to let nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around, ain't going to let nobody turn me around. I'm going to keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up the freedom lane. Four days later we reached the outskirts of Montgomery. We had to sit and wait a couple of hours by the airport for Dr. King to come in. He came on in and he led us on to the city of St. Jude. I remember when we got there all I could do was lay down and sigh, just feel down and start crying. I was crying that anger, that hurt, I was crying that joy that I felt because I had started something like my grandmother said and I had completed it. And this lady named Miss Mary Lamar, Miss Mary told him, just leave her alone and let her cry. I don't know how long I was on the ground crying, but I know when I got up I felt like I could do anything. And I knew I was going to do whatever I needed to do in my life to make change. Of course you know that five months later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law. Children, young people. Children of Birmingham, children of Selma, we united a city, a state and a nation. And young people had that same opportunity. And now they don't have to go to jail, but they have that same opportunity. And as older adults, we, I think one of our main jobs is to help lift our young people up.

See, the movie Selma, and I'm going to stop after this. The movie Selma came out, my book, Turning Fifteen, came out on January 8, 2015. The movie Selma came out on January 9th. That's the only thing, there's two things I liked about it. One, that it came out the day after my book and people associated it, my book and the movie Selma. So I, my first, the first print of my book was twenty five thousand copies. That was money. Ok. And the, so I liked that part about it. The movie was not, the movie was about Dr. King, which was fine. But they called it Selma, and Selma movement was a children's movement. They did not have but one child in the whole movie, and I can tell you the scene. So that was an insult. But in the sound glory, Common says, you need the wisdom of the elders and the energy of the young. I firmly agree. You need the wisdom of the elders so you can know where you've been, why you're here and where you need to go. But you also need the energy and wisdom of the young. We don't give our young people enough credit for having wisdom. And they do. They do. They're going to change. They're going to bring about the change that we need that will be permanent and good for all. The other day when I was being interviewed, we talked about why it was so important for the people in the northwest, east, west, to care about the people in Selma.

And it's important for people all over to care about each other. I use the analogy of the forest fires in Canada. We must start thinking about what affects one affects all. Because that smoke came to the northeast and guess what, it came to Selma. It came to Alabama and then it went somewhere else. What affects one will eventually affect all. And we better start recognizing that. My grandmother way back in the 50's would say, you need to look at you baby, decide what you want to do. Take what's good in you you like and build it up. And if there's something inside you you don't like, then you need to get rid of it or change it. And that's what I mean when I say we need to put the word human back in the word humanity. We need to know just how far we are willing to go for anything. And when we think about how far we're willing to go, we also need to think. About how it's going to affect everyone around you. That's my story. Thank you. Questions? Yeah. Okay. How you feeling? I'm feeling pretty good. So let's take about one or two questions, and then we're going to pray, and then we'll wrap. Does anyone have any questions? One in the back. Yeah. So he's asking about just a reiteration of your mom and your dad. My mother died when I was seven years old.

When we started marching, my mom had been dead about six years. My father, my maternal grandmother moved from Detroit to help my father raise me and my siblings. My father wasn't too keen on us marching, but my grandmother was, and eventually my father came around. When he picked me up that night from the hospital, I had the thirty-five stitches in my head, my head shaved and everything, my father was very angry. And I remember just the first time him and my grandmother had a shouting argument with each other. She's sending his children out to get killed and you know, our parents, our parents was with us. They prayed with us, they hyped us up, they did what was necessary but they, after Bloody Sunday, they were more angry than we were. And Dr. King came down and he and Dr. Abernathy and about 500 students marched and was jailed. They let us out, the students out, that first day. They let Dr. Abernathy out that second day. That third day, Malcolm X came to town and spoke at Brown Chapel Church and I was sitting up there in the choir stand behind him and Malcolm said, in essence, you've tried non-balance, see that doesn't work, you need to pick up the gun and take your freedom. And I remember getting, I wanted to hit him because I got very angry because this man was standing up there telling my daddy and other people to take their little double-barreled shotgun that they used to go hunting with and go out there and shoot at those white people and those white people had these automatic guns, so if they shot one white person, you know, those white people were going to shoot fifty black people.

I wanted to hurt Malcolm myself, I will not lie. Because he was telling my daddy to go out there and kill himself, get killed. That's just the way I saw it. I just want to reiterate that, at that same meeting, Fred Shuttlesworth and Malcolm X got into a highly heated debate over the idea of moving forward with non-violence in the movement. So Fred is always around us all. He most certainly was, but on that same night while we were at that mass meeting, the police. Put Dr. King in their car and brought them to Brown Chapel. I guess they said they'd rather have this non-violent Negro than that violent one. Let's give it up for Ms. Linda one more time. I love her so much.