By Steven Ragsdale
This past weekend, thousands gathered in Alabama for the annual Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee Celebration, retracing the famous steps across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where civil rights marchers once faced violence for demanding the right to vote. As the nation reflected on that history, many of today’s and yesterday’s activists also mourned the recent passing of three people who helped shape it—Bernard Lafayette Jr., one of the youngest organizers of the Selma movement, and sisters Lynda Blackmon Lowery and Joanne Bland, who marched as children and later spent their lives recounting the story of the Southern movement’s foot soldiers to many admirers.
For those of us in Baltimore, that moment of remembrance carries a deeper and more profound connection. Our city has a unique place in the long struggle for voting rights. Unknown to many, Baltimore’s African-American community gathered on May 19, 1870, to celebrate the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution in one of the largest parades since the nation’s founding. Newly enfranchised African American citizens traveled near and far, filled the streets with parades, celebrations and heard a heartfelt keynote address by a Frederick Douglass who now believed that the promise of American democracy might finally include them. In his first trip back to Baltimore since his escape, he urged the crowd to exercise their newly won voting rights, seek education and build economic independence.
A century later, the foot soldiers of Selma would take the baton to help ensure that a promise made in Baltimore would be honored with a similar purpose and energy.
Dr. Bernard Lafayette Jr., who died March 5, 2026, was the key organizer of the Selma movement and a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As a young man, he volunteered to go to help an area that most allies spoke of with a sense of reasonable skepticism, if not outright panic-driven terror. But Lafayette would meet with local activist Amelia Boynton and other local citizens to begin organizing the Selma campaign that would eventually lead to the historic marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge that helped secure the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As one of the youngest leaders of SNCC, Lafayette represented the high-pressured strategic heartbeat of the Selma movement. He often noted that history had recorded the high-profile murder of the NAACP leader Medgar Evers in detail. But it sometimes forgot that attempts were made on his life and the life of Ben Elton Cox, a fellow traveler and preacher linked to the Louisiana CORE organization. The attempt was made on the same night that Evers was killed in a conspiracy that involved a KKK plan that would have ended in the death of three men from different civil rights organizations. Working alongside other organizers and local leaders, he helped translate the philosophy of nonviolence into disciplined action. The marches that captured the attention of the nation did not happen by accident. They were the result of careful organizing, training, and the courage of local communities willing to stand together in the face of intimidation and violence.
In the decades that followed, Lafayette never treated Selma as something that belonged only to the history books. He spent the rest of his life teaching and promoting nonviolence as both a philosophy and a practical method for confronting injustice. To him, the Civil Rights Movement was not simply a chapter in American history. It was a runway for how communities could organize themselves to challenge injustice wherever it appears.
Around the same time of Lafayette’s passing, we also lost two women whose courage helped define that moment: Lynda Blackmon Lowery, who died Jan. 22, and less than a month later, her sister Joanne Bland, who died Feb.19. Both born in Selma, Ala., they were more than sisters in the struggle to the very end.
Their introduction to the Civil Rights Movement came through personal tragedy. In 1957, they lost their mother after segregated medical care chose not to treat her properly with a life‑saving blood transfusion needed during a complicated childbirth. This is a story that they both recounted their father naming and telling repeatedly was “15 Minutes Too Late.” That loss of a 34-year-old mother opened their eyes as children to the harsh realities of life under segregation and shaped their understanding of injustice long before they were old enough to vote.
Instead of retreating into silence, they stepped forward … and that was rarely easy.
As teenagers they joined the growing movement in Selma, attending mass meetings, participating in demonstrations and eventually taking part in the historic marches that would draw the nation’s attention to the struggle for voting rights in the South. The teachers and preachers were involved, so it must be OK.
On Bloody Sunday in 1965, young people like Lynda and Joanne crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge knowing and fearing the violence awaiting them. Many of those marchers, including a 14-year-old Lynda, were beaten and terrorized simply for demanding the most basic rights promised to them by the Constitution. She would receive a total of 35 stitches that day – seven above her right eye, and 28 that were the result of a deep gash in the back of her head.
Yet, what stands out about these sisters is not only the courage they showed as young activists, but the way they carried and used the scars and traumatic experiences productively throughout their lives.
For decades, Joanne Bland became one of the most powerful storytellers of the Selma movement, helping younger generations understand what happened on those streets and why it mattered. At age 11, she was the youngest person to march across the bridge on Bloody Sunday, spending years afterwards sharing her experience and reminding audiences that the movement was built not only by famous leaders, but by young people willing to gamble and act on behalf of their own interests.
They were born in the land of the old Confederacy, but their work took them far beyond Selma. Over the years they connected with communities across the country and beyond speaking with fellow activists, educators, students, faith leaders and civic groups from places like Seattle, Scottsdale, New York, Canada, Puerto Rico and even Baltimore. In every audience they encountered, both carried the story of Selma with them, reminding people that the struggle for justice belongs to every community willing to claim it.
Together they helped ensure that the story of Selma and the broader Civil Rights Movement would not fade into abstraction. They told it with grace, honesty, humility and a deep sense of responsibility to the history they had lived … and was still living at the time when we met.
Through it all, Joanne and Lynda remained bound not only by history but by sisterhood, walking the long road of memory and witness together for the rest of their lives. Few in history can boast of a similar bond, though many would say the Blackmon sisters certainly could have, and they never did.
Their lives remind us that the Civil Rights Movement was not simply a moment in time. It was a lifelong commitment to justice carried forward by people who understood that freedom must be defended generation by generation.
The movement itself had a name for these unsung heroes of Civil Rights. They were called foot soldiers. There is a special breakfast held annually during the Bridge Crossing Jubilee weekend to specifically honor those who were on the front lines of “Bloody Sunday.” While there, you are just a short walk across the bridge to Foot Soldiers Park, a public space that celebrates their efforts.
The name was never meant to characterize them as pawns or diminish their importance. In truth, the term recognized how movements succeed. While history often remembers speeches and famous leaders, the Civil Rights Movement depended on thousands of ordinary people who showed up day after day. They attended church meetings, raised funds, organized neighbors, registered voters and marched even when they knew the consequences might include jail, injury or the ultimate sacrifice.
The courage of people like Lynda Blackmon Lowery and Joanne Bland reminds us that the movement was not nurtured by a handful of well-known figures alone. It was sustained by communities—by teachers, students, parents, ministers, an overwhelming class of low-wage workers and young people—who believed that the promise of cutting a more perfect path toward democracy was easily worth the sacrifice.
These foot soldiers were the backbone of the movement. They created the momentum that forced our country to confront its own contradictions and move closer to the ideals written into its founding documents, one of which we will celebrate on its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026.
For me, the story of the Blackmon sisters is not just history. It is personal. Their cousin, Perry Blackmon, is a college friend of mine. Many Baltimoreans know him if you attended Morgan State University or through his work directing security for the HBO series “The Wire.” But long before he started his own business, Perry was someone I trusted with my own safety and security in the music industry years ago. But when I ran into him last fall, he shared with me that the Blackmon sisters were his relatives and that he too had received training and words of wisdom from Dr. Lafayette.
Connections like that are reminders that the Civil Rights Movement is not something that lives only in textbooks. It moves through families, friendships, and communities that carry the lessons of the past into the present.
Last year, I had the privilege of learning more about the lives of Lynda Blackmon Lowery and Joanne Bland through the Institute of Common Power, whose work helps connect new generations with the lived experiences of civil rights veterans. It is people like Drs. Terry Anne Scott and David Domke, former history professors who left full-time jobs at Hood College and the University of Washington, that help ordinary people connect our past with the present day and the potential for an alternative future. Watching professors who left the security of a college job to help working teachers and anybody willing to learn to preserve democracy is astounding, but listening to the Blackmon sisters speak about Selma made history feel less like something distant and more like something still unfolding.
This past weekend, the sense of transition is being felt by many across the country. In Chicago, thousands recently gathered to say goodbye to longtime civil rights leader Jesse Jackson Sr., with former heads of state, clergy and community leaders coming together to honor a life shaped by the same movement that brought the nation to Selma, including a young Rev. Jackson. In this year’s Jubilee, Selma Mayor Johnny Moss III proclaimed Jesse Jackson Day, recognizing the longtime civil rights leader’s decades of work advocating for voting rights and economic justice. Moments like these remind us that the struggle for justice has long connected cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Selma—communities bound by the same determination to turn the promise of democracy into lived reality.
I thought about that this past weekend as people gathered again in Selma to celebrate the Jubilee.
As the Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee unfolded, I found myself wishing I could be there again. Last February I walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Standing there, you cannot help but think about the young people who crossed that bridge in 1965 knowing they might be beaten simply for demanding the right to vote, the ultimate American experience.
For many, that experience stays with you.
Crossing that bridge is not just symbolic. It is a reminder that the freedoms many Americans enjoy today were secured by ordinary people willing to risk everything for the promise of democracy.
Joanne Bland often explained the movement with a simple metaphor she shared with students and community groups. “Everybody has a piece of the puzzle,” she would say. “If you don’t bring your piece, the picture will never be complete.” It was her way of reminding people that the victories of the Civil Rights Movement were not the work of a few famous leaders, but of thousands of individuals who decided their piece mattered.
In many ways, the marchers of Selma were adding their piece to a picture that Black communities had been working to complete for generations—stretching back to moments like Baltimore’s celebration of the 15th Amendment in 1870, when newly enfranchised citizens believed the promise of democracy might finally come into view.
The passing of Bernard Lafayette Jr., the Blackmon sisters, and Rev. Jackson remind us that a generation of witnesses is leaving us.
They carried the movement on their backs when the cost was high and the outcome uncertain.
They did their part of the work. And they did it well, but the struggle for justice was never meant to end with them.
From Baltimore’s celebration of the 15th Amendment to the courage shown on the Edmund Pettus Bridge a century later, the promise of American democracy has always depended on ordinary people willing to stand up for it. Let us not forget to salute the fallen for a job well done.
But now that responsibility belongs to us. Their march is finished. The baton has been handed to the next generations. Now, it is our time and our turn.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.