S4E57 TRUTH QUEST: Selma - Edmund Pettus Bridge; Birmingham - 16th Street Baptist Church (REPRISE))
In this final episode of the summer series TRUTH QUEST, our travelers make their way to Selma and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In March of 1965, civil rights protesters were met by a lineup of armed police (many on horseback) with attack dogs and billy clubs who ordered them to turn back. When the marchers refused, they were brutally attacked on a day that became known as Bloody Sunday. SNCC Director John Lewis (later Congressman) was viciously beaten and nearly died that day. We take a ceremonial walk across that bridge. We proceed to Birmingham, known in the 50s and 60s as "Bombingham," where Martin Luther King (along with Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth) were imprisoned in 1963 for their civil disobedience. We hear a reading of King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail (Osahon Obazuaye). Several months after King wrote his letter, a bomb exploded on a Sunday morning as the congregation gathered for worship in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. A fifth, Sarah Collins, lost her sister and best friends but survived the blast. All these years later, she met with our group in the memorial park across from the church and shared her story. Ken wraps the series with some reflections, from several fellow travelers and then some concluding reflections of his own. SHOW NOTES
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Listen to the entire series - TRUTH QUEST: Exploring the History of Race in America - in their own words.
