Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/458422
E T I R E D O A K L A N D t e a c h e r H a r r i e t Hutchinson knows that Martin Luther King Jr.'s Alabama voting rights campaign is dramatized in the film Selma, which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. She just isn't sure she wants to see it. She was there in Selma for the third and final march in 1965. Her younger son saw the movie and told her, "Oh, Mom, you've got to go see it. You were there!" She pauses, remembering what she saw there. Any fictionalizing of this vital history worries her. "It makes it a little less raw." The Selma march, which led to President Johnson sign- ing the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, inspired her activist life and 40 years of teaching in Oakland Unified. In 1965, from her college in New Jersey, she rode on a bus full of activists who were heeding King's national call to come to Selma. She had led a somewhat sheltered life, she says, but knew about the civil rights struggles and the dan- gers from beatings or worse. "We were white kids. Nobody did stuff like that to us, I thought. So there really wasn't a whole lot of fear." No fear, despite blacks and supporters who'd been bru- tally assaulted by state troopers in the first Selma march on "Bloody Sunday," March 7 — turned back with tear gas and clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (King was not present). TV news coverage of the attacks shocked the nation. On March 9, King led the second protest march to the bridge, but turned back, with apparent safety concerns for participants. Hutchinson's bus arrived in Selma after a long journey on March 24. She was fed in a Selma church, and King spoke to the crowd of marchers, thanking them. That night, as she slept in a sleeping bag on a muddy field with others, she recalls falling asleep as folksingers like Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary sang in the distance. As federal troops lined the streets the next day, Hutchin- son walked with a crowd that would swell to 25,000, From Selma to the Voting Rights Act, black history milestones remembered 50 years later: By Mike Myslinski past local racists who were holding Confederate flags, yelling, making obscene ges- tures and spitting on people, she says. But the nonviolent marchers kept on. "People just kept coming and coming and coming." Hutchinson got separated from her group of friends, but with the help of the famed folksinger Odetta, got a ride on a flatbed truck back to her bus for home. Her truck was two vehicles ahead of one with white activist Viola Liuzzo. "She was one of the volunteers who was driving people in her car — and somebody shot and killed her that night on the way back." Three Ku Klux Klan members were later convicted of depriving Liuzzo of her civil rights in the attack and sentenced to 10-year prison terms. Unafraid and inspired, Hutchinson taught reading that summer of 1965 in the Mississippi Delta, at a Head Start school in Fitler. It was a special research reading program run by the Child Development Group of Mississippi, and Hutchinson stayed in the home of an African American family active in the civil rights movement. The concerned father sat watch outside her bedroom door at night, holding a shotgun to protect her. In 1963, she took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Recently, she has visited Oakland classrooms during Black History Month to talk about Selma and King's legacy to make them real for new generations. During one visit, an 8-year-old girl asked her if she had met escaped slave Harriet Tubman, the Underground R ailroad activist who died in 1913. Hutchinson smiled. "I was just telling her about my life experiences, and for this little kid it could have been from hundreds of years ago." Hutchinson is a witness to history, but humble about it, noting that the murdered or beaten civil rights activists from those years are the real heroes. "All I did was ride a bus and show up on the last day and walk with a whole bunch of people there," she says. "I sort of looked at it as, you know, in my heart I knew it was something we had to do." R Harriet Hutchinson witnessed the March on Washington in 1963 and the march from Selma to Montgomery 50 years ago. Experiences Perspectives 25 V O L U M E 1 9 I S S U E 6