Written by: Tim Buckley

February 24, 2026

JoAnne Bland of Selma, Alabama, recently died at the age of 72. In 1965, as a young adult, I answered Dr. King’s call to join the Voting Rights Movement in Selma. Arrival at Brown Chapel, in the heart of the public housing community, brought an unexpected welcome — it was the children who greeted us.

They were the Children of the Movement.

While many adults feared losing their jobs if they attempted to register to vote, the children stepped forward. They sat at segregated lunch counters, marched in the streets, endured beatings, faced police dogs and fire hoses, and filled the jails. They stood on the front lines in the fight for justice.

Those same children were the first to welcome the newcomers to Selma. They brought us into their homes, offering shelter and even their beds, because they were accustomed to sleeping on jail cell floors. They showed us where meals would be served, explained how the community was organized, and assigned daily responsibilities — kitchen duty, cleanup, and the countless tasks required to sustain a rapidly growing movement. Schedules were posted to ensure a constant presence at the barricade maintained by the county sheriff and state troopers — the barrier that blocked the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge toward the state capital in Montgomery.

It was also the children who introduced us to the discipline of nonviolence. From hard experience, they taught us how to protect our heads from billy clubs, how to stand firm when confronted by authorities, and how to draw strength from one another as we locked arms and sang “We Shall Overcome.” During the daily marches to the courthouse, the children of Selma stood beside us and strengthened our resolve to remain nonviolent.

JoAnne was not someone I met in 1965, yet she was surely there. By the age of eleven, she had already been arrested and jailed ten times. She would have been among those children watching over the naïve northerners who had not yet encountered the depth of hatred awaiting us.

Fifty years later, a UU-sponsored pilgrimage brought me back to Selma, where JoAnne and I did meet. That visit marked the first time I spoke publicly about my memories of the Civil Rights Movement. Upon meeting, she thanked me for coming to help. As a young child, she said, she had not known there were “good white people” until she saw white northerners standing with them in Selma.

Such gratitude was unexpected. Her words came from a place not fully understood at the time. There is a certain luxury in never having known the pain of discrimination.

That day, we sat together and reflected on the turning point in history we had both witnessed fifty years earlier. JoAnne devoted her life to educating others about that dark chapter in our nation’s story. Through her work, she showed that understanding can open the door to forgiveness — and that truth, told honestly and boldly, can become a force for good.

Her life’s work ensured that the story of Selma would be remembered without distortion, without softening, and without compromise.