AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Before I met Joanne Bland back in 2022, I was told to expect a bossy grandmother who is totally awesome.
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RASCOE: Should I call you Miss Bland?
JOANNE BLAND: Most people call me Miss Bland…
RASCOE: Miss Bland.
BLAND: …If they’re younger than me.
RASCOE: (Laughter) Well, I’m going to call you Miss Bland.
Miss Bland drove me around Selma, Alabama, wearing a T-shirt that said kindness. She spent more than 30 years guiding visitors through the city where she was born, and she had a story for every block.
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BLAND: We are now turning on to Water Avenue, one of the first streets in Selma when Selma became a city. At one period in our history, this was as far inland as you could come from the Gulf of Mexico into the state of Alabama, so it made Selma a major trade mecca. You see this red building on the right?
RASCOE: Yeah.
BLAND: This was a slave holding pen. The slaves were brought up from the river and housed on the second floor.
RASCOE: Journeys for the soul – that’s what Joanne Bland called her tours. Bland was just 11 years old on March 7, 1965, the day now known as Bloody Sunday. She had come with her older sister to join a march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. Before they’d even left Selma, the activists, led by Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, were met by armed state troopers and local police, some on horseback, and viciously beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Film captured that day brought the brutality used to suppress the rights of Black Americans into homes across the U.S. Living that history drove Bland to dedicate her life to sharing it, trying to safeguard the lessons from that time.
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BLAND: This is urgent, that we start to capture our own histories, that I’m one of the youngest people who participated – one of, not the youngest. But we’re leaving here every day. And when we leave, those stories are gone. Who will tell the story?
RASCOE: Selma native and lifelong civil rights activist Joanne Bland died last week at the age of 72. Her family announced her death in a statement saying, Miss Bland departed this life surrounded by love, leaving behind a legacy of strength, grace and unwavering dedication to her family and community. For this remembrance, we wanted to revisit our 2022 tour and let Joanne Bland – Miss Bland to me – tell her story one more time.
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BLAND: Now, listen, let me tell you all this, OK? And don’t ask me a question.
RASCOE: (Laughter) I won’t.
BLAND: The area you’re in is George Washington Carver home. This is where I grew up at, but this area became the center of the voting rights struggle.
RASCOE: Joanne Bland was raised in this public housing by her dad and grandma. It was a haven for local and out-of-town activists.
BLAND: My grandmother and most of the mothers in the community would say when it would start to get dark in the evening, to go find a white person because we would always find them sitting on those steps, the steps of Brown Chapel, with a backpack on their back leaning against the wall and perfectly happy to sleep there because they couldn’t stay at hotels. It was dangerous for them because they were outside agitators.
RASCOE: We get out of the car at Brown Chapel AME Church, one of the most famous sites in civil rights history.
Now, did you listen to Martin Luther King here?
BLAND: Of course.
RASCOE: Of course.
BLAND: The one thing I remember – he was always eager to talk to us, young people. And when the elders would try to keep us away, he’d say, no, let them come, let them come. And he would ask you about your day, and you wanted to tell him every detail. And at 9 o’clock, I went to the restroom, you know, stuff like that.
RASCOE: (Laughter) Yeah.
BLAND: Just to stay in his presence. And he always had a peppermint, a Starlight peppermint, and he would always give you that peppermint. And to this day, I love peppermints.
RASCOE: Yeah.
Bland marches us to the edge of a small, kind of rundown playground, surrounded by a chain link fence and old, chipped pavement.
BLAND: I want you to stand on this cement. I need you to find a rock. Hurry up, little girl, dear. We ain’t got all day. It’s cold out here. You see that rock?
RASCOE: I see this rock.
BLAND: You know who stood on that rock.
RASCOE: Who?
BLAND: Child, John Lewis stood on that rock.
RASCOE: Oh, wow.
BLAND: You see, you’re standing on the last piece of the original cement, where we gathered on what is now known as Bloody Sunday. I followed John Lewis and Hosea Williams up to that bridge to be beaten by law enforcement officers. You’re standing on sacred ground.
RASCOE: With that, we get back in the car and make our way along what’s now Martin Luther King Street.
BLAND: This is First Baptist. First Baptist was SNCC headquarters. This is where they tried to teach me the principles of nonviolence. I flunked.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
We’re probably about a mile from where the marchers were attacked on Bloody Sunday.
BLAND: This is also where I came back to. My sister and I, Linda, ran back here. We ran past our house, thinking we didn’t have time to unlock the door because those same men were chasing the marchers back. And we were terrified. And we kept running, and we ran up those steps and went inside the church thinking we were safe. We were not. They came into the church and started beating people all over again.
RASCOE: My goodness.
BLAND: Yeah, I saw them pick up a young man about 16 years old and just hoist him above their heads and throw him into the baptismal pool. What happened at that bridge didn’t stop at that bridge. It happened out here all night long.
RASCOE: She never stops teaching. Here’s the dividing line between Black and white Selma. Here is the house where Dr. King stayed. She stops the van in front of a large house that looks like a plantation.
BLAND: I’ve come a long, long way with this civil rights history because it’s been like therapy talking about it. It was like a cleansing. But I’m not nearly in that same place with this slavery history. Our history had to be the worst of all mankind.
RASCOE: We don’t get out of the car here. Bland has only been inside the house, now a museum, once.
BLAND: When I opened that door, I was overwhelmed with the beauty of this house. It has been completely restored to the way it was in the 1800s. It has a stairway that drew me to it like a magnet. And I stood there marveling over this wonderful craftsmanship and wondering, did some of my ancestors do this incredible work?
RASCOE: Our next stop shows just how tied up that civil war history remains with the progress of the civil rights era.
BLAND: This cemetery – I have a love-hate relationship with it. The trees are magnificent.
RASCOE: They are beautiful.
BLAND: I mean, huge, huge magnolias and oaks. Oh, my goodness, it’s just amazing. And then all this evil is inside of it.
RASCOE: Bland drives through the dirt roads of Live Oak Cemetery. It predates the Civil War and includes a monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate General and KKK grand wizard. You would think the monument is old, like the cemetery, but it actually was put up after Selma elected its first Black mayor in 2000.
BLAND: When I look at it, it says to me, you may have a Negro mayor, but I’m still here. We got to find a way to change hearts. And the people who think like that are still here, and they’re still fighting this war, you know?
RASCOE: ‘Cause there are Confederate flags up.
BLAND: I use this as a teaching tool to let young people know it wasn’t that long ago, that this is still here.
RASCOE: What do you say to those people who will say they’re concerned about teaching this sort of history to young white children because they worry that they will feel bad about themselves?
BLAND: Well, one, you can’t let a child leave thinking you’re blaming them. You’re not even blaming their parents. Hopefully, I’m inspiring that white child with the stories of the past to make sure this never, ever happens to another people.
RASCOE: Is this where you end the tour?
BLAND: Yeah, kind of, sort of. There are a couple more things I want to show you.
RASCOE: Bland drives us back toward downtown, stopping just short of the bridge where her life – and America, really – changed back in 1965. It’s still named for another Confederate general and KKK leader, and Bland wouldn’t change that.
BLAND: When you change names, you change history. I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All those bad things he did – every time you walk across that bridge, I bet he’s rolling in his grave. That’s what grandma would say.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
BLAND: I think what we did was changed the whole meaning of this bridge.
RASCOE: On March 25, 1965, on their third try, marchers joined by Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Montgomery, Alabama. Joanne Bland was among them. The Voting Rights Act passed that August.
BLAND: Selma gave so much. This history is so rich. It’s sort of like Mecca. I had so many people to tell me they didn’t realize the bridge was that small. That’s because the history is so huge, so huge.
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RASCOE: That was civil rights activist Joanne Bland in 2022. She died last week. She was 72 years old.
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