Back in Selma

The calendar tells me I’m getting old. Fifty years ago, in Selma, Alabama, I was getting educated.

 A college student in Wisconsin at the time, I ventured south to participate in the civil rights movement, including the voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery that began on March 21, 1965. It was there that my real education began, or at least a significant part of it. This past weekend, many of us who marched in Selma gathered there again, this time to mark the 50th anniversary of the event.

“You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation,” Martin Luther King Jr. told us at at the start of the march. “Walk together, children. Don’t get weary, and it will lead us to the Promised Land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.”