Selma’s youngest marcher shares memories

Associated Press

NEW YORK

“Steady, loving confrontation.”

Those were the first words Lynda Blackmon Lowery says she heard from the mouth of Martin Luther King, Jr. “And those three words changed my life,” said Lowery, who at 15 was the youngest person to join King for the 1965 march from the Alabama cities of Selma to Montgomery, demanding voting rights for African-Americans.

On Sunday in New York, the now 64-year-old mother and grandmother showed the scars she still bears on the back of her head from a brutal beating at the hands of an Alabama state trooper during an earlier march when she was 14. It took 28 stitches to close the gash, and seven more above her right eye.

Lowery spoke at the New-York Historical Society on the eve of today’s federal holiday marking King’s birthday. The audience represented all races and ages, including children who sidled up to her for photos, peppering her with questions such as, faced with the brutality, “Why didn’t you fight back?”

She explained that they would have been killed if they did — unarmed, confronting “a sea of white men on foot and horseback,” armed with rifles, bayonets, billy clubs and fierce dogs, plus tear gas.

“It was terrifying,” she said.

A month earlier, activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by a state trooper. His death inspired three marches from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery.

On Aug. 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

By the time she was 15, Lowery had been jailed nine times.

But there were moments of comic relief.

Flashing a warm smile, she recounted how when she and her young friends were released from the “sweatbox” — a windowless, sweltering-hot cell — police asked them to sign their names for the record.

“We wrote, ‘Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Pluto, ...’” she said, grinning mischievously.

King is at the core of Lowery’s memoir, titled “Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom.” It was published earlier this month as Americans packed theaters to watch the film “Selma” about the early civil-rights movement, produced by Oprah Winfrey. The movie has been nominated for two Oscars, in the categories of best picture and best original song.