Bearing Witness to Racism in America, a Journey of Contemplative History in Alabama

This spring I attended my second Bearing Witness retreat led by the Zen Peacemakers. Along with a group from around the US we spent a week in Alabama, tracing the history of slavery, segregation, racism, and the labor for freedom, in particular the thrust of the civil rights movement and its actions in the spring of 1965. We were there within weeks of the 60th anniversary of the historic events that began at the Edmund Pettus Bridge there in Selma, commencing into a 50 mile march to the capitol building in Montgomery, news and images of which were seen around the world as Martin Luther King Jr., prominent civil rights leaders, and thousands of demonstrators confronted violence and death by police, the Klan, and politicians and citizens alike doing everything in their power to thwart voter registration and non-violent action.

This journey was powerfully moving for me in its raw history, and in the way we were invited to bear witness to these legacies with such cognitive and emotional receptivity. This contemplative approach of confronting painful reality came from the methods of the late Bernie Glassman, a maverick American Zen Buddhist priest and student of the Japanese teacher Taizan Maezumi. Glassman combined traditional Zen instruction with multi-day immersions in such places as the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in Poland, the killing fields of the Rwandan genocide, as well as the streets of American cities where he and his followers would live alongside the homeless for a week at a stretch. In 2022 I spent a week in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming and Montana bearing witness to the devastation borne by the Lakota and other indigenous peoples at the hands of settlers and the American government.

Arriving in Selma, Alabama already feels like traveling decades back in time. Every corner of the city, whose population is over 80% Black, seems to be straining under the pall of disinvestment, and the unrepaired scars of a 2023 tornado has left swaths of neighborhoods looking as if they’d been shelled. But Selma stands as something of a living monument to Civil Rights struggles in the Jim Crow South, and rather than sanitized and museumified, emits its painful history in the raw.

The spring of 1965 was pivotal American history. In the fall of 1963 the Birmingham church bombers had killed four young Black girls. The policy of the “Black Belt” of the South was clear: segregation must stand. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial discrimination under the law, but the reality was otherwise across the South. The area of Selma in 1961, with a nearly 60% Black population, had a Black voter registration rate of less than 1%.

Dr. King and his colleagues saw Selma as a solemn stage from which to try and speak to the world. The state’s governor George Wallace had already stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to personally block the school’s first two enrolled Black students from entering. The city’s main bridge, spanning from downtown across the Alabama River, bore the name of Edmund Pettus, a Confederate war leader, US Senator, and Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

By the start of 1965, demonstrations were taking place across the state with hundreds arrested in civil disobedience. In February in Marion, not far from Selma, officers cut off the streetlights around a group of assembled activists and attacked. Jimmie Lee Jackson, a deacon and organizer, fled into a cafe with his grandfather and mother. A state trooper pursued, shooting and killing him.

Jackson’s murder sparked calls for a march to the capital to confront Governor Wallace, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge would be the starting point. The first assembly on the bridge was March 7th, 1965 and would come to be known as Bloody Sunday. The county Sheriff had invited all white men over 21 to be deputized in response to the influx of activists. The ensuing confrontation between the peaceful demonstrators and the police left bodies battered and unconscious. A 14-year old girl needed dozens of stitches. Organizer Amelia Boynton was knocked unconscious (though she would go on to live to 110). John Lewis (who would go on to serve 17 terms in the House of Representatives) had his skull fractured.

*An exhibit in a National Parks building – employees there were unsure how much longer they’d have jobs.*

Two days later, marchers reassembled on the Pettus Bridge. Dr. King held a short prayer with the 2,500 demonstrators but, heeding a Federal court injunction, King made the controversial move not to proceed on what would come to be known as Turnaround Tuesday. That night, James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston who had travelled to Alabama to support the movement, was beaten by a group of white men with clubs. Reeb died of his brain injuries and all the men were acquitted.

By March 21st, the nation and the world were watching. The organizers convened again, aiming themselves toward Governor Wallace’s office in Montgomery, 50 miles to the east. As Wallace refused to protect the marchers, President Lyndon Johnson called in the National Guard, Federal Marshalls, and FBI to line the road. Over several days, thousands walked from Selma to Montgomery where a crowd of 25,000 people assembled at the steps of the Alabama Capitol.

Compelled by the pressure of the movement and the growing attention of the world, LBJ had called a joint session of Congress a week earlier to produce what would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which would go into effect later that summer. Though the 15th Amendment had given Black men the right to vote in 1870 (women would be denied the vote until 1920), Jim Crow laws and vigilante intimidation and violence was effectively disenfranchising the nation’s Black voters. The Voting Rights Act brought a more measurable results on voter equity, giving the government power to monitor voter registration in states with histories of voter interference, and outlawing literacy tests and punitive measures (like guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar) that had been used to turn away Black voters.

President Johnson had made it clear he was acting in response to the protest movement, and in his speech to the nation announcing the Act he ended by invoking the words King had made famous, “we shall overcome.”

*Meeting with Selma Mayor James Perkins Jr.*

My own knowledge of this history was general and scattered, and standing on that ground and walking those streets brought the history into me deeply. Our group met with the mayor of Selma, James Perkins Jr., himself a veteran of the civil rights movement, hearing his hope and struggle with a city that carries such honor as well as the weight of its sacrifices and punishments. We went to Sunday services at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. We walked to the AME Church where King addressed gatherings in the thousands, despite an injunction barring any more than three people from congregating for the purposes of racial justice advocacy. We met with a local activist who shared her work bringing poor residents and law enforcement together in constructive dialogue. We visited the ghost town of Cahawba where, in the days of the South’s magnificent wealth and prominence, Edmund Pettus himself had resided for a time. And we sat cross legged and meditated in the dust below the bridge that still bears his name.

In the second half of the week we drove to Montgomery, the stretch that so many had walked on sore feet past jeering counter-protesters and threats of death. The road along which, after the march to the State Capital, white Detroit housewife Viola Liuzzo had been murdered by Klansmen for volunteering to drive demonstrators back to their homes in Selma.

We walked the streets of the capital, Montgomery significantly more polished and gentrified than Selma. We meditated by the riverbank where the slave boats had unloaded their human freight to be washed and inspected. Passed the bus station where Rosa Parks and so many others had let the bus pass them by rather than be segregated to the back.

*Now a museum, the Greyhound station in Montgomery was part of the freedom rider’s campaigns that saw buses burned and activists beaten.*

We walked the halls of the Legacy Museum, a speechless journey from the middle passage to the mass incarceration complex. And we wept as we were slowly swallowed by the unspeakable grief of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, better known as the lynching memorial, where each rusted coffin-like monolith hanging in the air bears a name, a date, and the county in which the woman, man, or child was lynched. One of the iron plaques told of the vigilante hangings from the Woodland Street Bridge in Nashville, Tennessee – the bridge that connected the very street I had once lived on to the city’s downtown.

Each evening we would divide into small groups and conduct “council,” a simple but deep ritual of taking turns speaking and listening from the heart. On each of these voyages we are reminded of the tenets of the Peacemaker practice: not knowing, bearing witness, and taking action. These daily circles formed a place to bring the unfathomable, the unknowable, the unbearable into our hearts with others and hold spoken or unspoken vigil.

I won’t take many words here to overlay these dark and dehumanizing histories on the current era of our country, but it is far from lost on me. When I looked up Alabama’s history of interracial marriage bans I learned that when it was finally officially removed from the state constitution in 2000 (33 years after the supreme court struck down interracial marriage bans nationwide) a full 40% of voters cast their ballot to keep the ban. Sitting there with my partner, a woman born to a North African mother and a West African father, we wondered how many would vote against us today.

I also won’t be able to approach properly honoring the countless brave souls who put everything on the line to help our nation inch toward the promised land of dignity and freedom. I will say that the more I learn, the less surprised I am by our current regressions. I kept thinking of a recent study I read that calculated the years of life lost to premature deaths among African Americans from 1999 to 2020. 80 million years was the total. This is the living legacy of 250 years of legal slavery and the 160 years since Abolition.

This is such important history to learn. But we can go beyond learning it – we can draw our hearts closer to its reality, its living memories, its human faces. We can look into the windows of history and see the reflections of ourselves, our line of beings prone to such feats of subjugation, torment, torture, destruction, and death. The same line of beings with such capacity to germinate hope, to survive, and to summon the will to overcome.

Draw closer. Walk. Sit. Breathe. Let us draw yet closer and not turn away. Words now are not needed. Just the breath of the moment. Then may this open-hearted intimacy guide our compassion, cradling us as the angels of loving peace we are able to be.

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Bearing Witness to Racism in America, a Journey of Contemplative History in Alabama

2025 Mind & Life Summer Research Institute