Remembrance: The day I marched in Selma

That early morning Montgomery, Alabama, crowd, which had gathered to meet our train from Washington, D.C., on March 25, 50 years ago, welcomed us with shouts of derision, profanity and obscenity.

But this was the final day of the Selma march. And I will always be deeply grateful that after so much violence against those who had begun this historic demonstration, our lives were now being protected by 2,000 U.S. Army troops, 1,900 federalized Alabama National Guardsmen and unnumbered FBI agents and U.S. Marshals.

Despite all of this, two of our fellow marchers were murdered by Klansmen: Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit, and the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from New England.

I will forever remember the great honor – and danger – of being one of the 30,000 participants in that march. We came from almost every state in the union.

I was one of four dozen clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of California who had responded to an appeal to participate in the Selma march. But since I had been my bishop's observer at the California Legislature in Sacramento, I was asked to go to Washington before Montgomery to lobby for passage of the Voting Rights Act.

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Then, I took a night train with other lobbyists to Alabama in order to march on the final day. Since I had been given the California bear state flag by my congressman, I carried it at the head of the California delegation.

On that train ride, I was accompanied by a considerable number of additional civil rights demonstrators bound for the march, who had also been lobbying in D.C.

One of these I remember most was a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania, with whom I very much enjoyed a series of theological argumentations that night.

I learned after the march that he had been assaulted so violently that his skull was fractured.

We gathered early in the morning at a large Catholic parochial school just outside Montgomery.

At midday, we began the march led by Dr. King, who I recall was one of more than 100 clergy who thusly risked our lives for civil rights.

We marched down a large hill and entered downtown Montgomery.

When we reached the street leading up to the Alabama State Capitol (where, as we suspected, Gov. Wallace was watching us), we assembled along the sidewalks to listen to the speakers, who were gathered on the Capitol steps.

That was the first time I had ever seen Dr. King in person. His speech was deeply moving and filled with the moral power of passive resistance.

The additional black speakers were distinctly different – in enunciating black power. But the most prominent advocate of that movement, Malcolm X, was nowhere to be found.

After they finished, we returned as quickly as possible to the railroad station. Here, the train took us first to Atlanta and then to Washington, from where I flew home to California.

The Washington Post reported this week:

"President Obama and former President George W. Bush will be at the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge.

"They are coming to rekindle the spirit of a city where 50 years earlier, nonviolent demonstrators endured billy clubs, cattle prods and clouds of tear gas as they protested for their right to vote. Selma's 'Bloody Sunday,' a day of shocking violence and stirring courage, spurred passage of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most important achievements of the civil rights era."

Media wishing to interview Les Kinsolving, please contact [email protected].