The Rev. Gillbert Caldwell, to the left of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., marches during a 1965 protest for racial justice. PHOTO COURTESY OF REV. GILLBERT CALDWELL AND THE CHURCH WITHIN A CHURCH MOVEMENT A ccording to two central New Jersey ministers with personal connections to the 1965 Selma march, Black History Month should belong to everyone.
The Rev. Gillbert Caldwell and the Rev. John Licitra, who spoke before a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Lincroft during January’s Inauguration Day, recall the watershed moment in the American Civil Rights struggle from two distinct vantage points. Caldwell, who walked alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and 25,000 others in the iconic 1965 voting rights protest, and Licitra, who retraced the march with 27 colleagues last September, stressed in a recent interview that all Americans have something to learn from black history, regardless of their color or creed.
“For the longest time, we have kind of viewed Black History Month as something that we have to do, to catch up and acknowledge the contributions of our African-American brothers and sisters,” Licitra said. “But the value goes so far beyond that.
The Rev. Gillbert H . Caldwell (far right) stands with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Virgil Wood during a demonstration at a public school in 1965. PHOTO COURTESY OF REV. GILLBERT CALDWELL “To embrace the history of the USA, you have to understand that it was slaves that built the Capitol building and the White House. The Constitution protected slavery for years. That is not a message that we all want to embrace, but it’s true nevertheless. Part of the importance of this month is acknowledging, learning to admit that we got it wrong. I think it starts there.”
Caldwell, a retired United Methodist minister currently living in Asbury Park, said part of honoring the spirit of Black History Month is learning to identify with the struggles of others.
“ ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ ” he said, quoting King, “could very well become a mantra for all of us every day. We suffer from acting as though justice for ourselves is important, but not justice for others.”
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, two iconic moments in U.S. history that converged last month as the nation’s first black president took his second consecutive oath of office, using both men’s Bibles.
This connection between the past and present, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, lay at the heart of the 1965 Selma march and other successful struggles for social justice, Caldwell said.
Part of the reason the Civil Rights Movement had such a powerful national impact, he said, is because it drew support from so many different factions. The Selma march, which grew out of a collaborative campaign for black voting rights in Alabama between the Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, ultimately counted black, white, male, female, Christian, Jewish and countless other faith and community groups among its supporters.
“One of my memories is that of standing next to Bishop James Pike on the steps of the church and hearing him say as he looked out at the crowd, ‘This is one of the greatest ecumenical and interfaith gatherings in history,’ ” Caldwell said. “It was a very moving time for us. There was such a diverse array of people, and that of course made its impact on the nation.”
Following the Freedom Rides of 1961, during which whites and blacks, ministers and rabbis, northerners and southerners were violently attacked while protesting Jim Crow laws throughout the South, diverse support for civil rights initiatives had grown significantly. When King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined up to help organize the Selma march, thousands from across the country pledged their allegiance as well.
One of those was Caldwell, who after earning a master’s degree at the Boston University School of Theology — where he first met King — received an unexpected telegram asking for his support.
“Martin Luther King sent out a telegram to ministers around the nation after Bloody Sunday,” he said, referring to the first attempted march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery on March 7, when more than 500 activists were beaten with nightsticks and sprayed with teargas by state troopers and deputized citizens. “I responded and went to Selma.”
Caldwell and another Boston minister, James Reeb, flew down together to take part in the second attempted march on March 9, when 1,500 were stopped by police as they crossed over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The group, Caldwell said, held a short prayer meeting and then turned around without any violence erupting. Later that night, however, three white ministers were violently attacked in Selma. One of them was Reeb, who died of his injuries two days later.
Reeb’s death, along with televised reports of the policesponsored violence on Bloody Sunday, helped shift the national opinion on civil rights protesters, Caldwell said, primarily because none of the marchers sank to the level of their attackers.
“We did not retaliate for those who were shooting at us, attacking us, siccing dogs on us,” he said. “The anger, the pain that segregation conjured up among those of us being victimized was palpable. But the training in the movement, not responding to violence with violence, that was a core element. And that is something I think the nation needs to understand and appreciate today.”
By staying true to the religious roots of the movement, he said, by collaborating with such a diverse group of supporters and by rallying behind a leader like King, the Selma marchers achieved much more than just reaching the state Capitol building.
“It mobilized the religious communities of the nation to identify with the Civil Rights Movement. It highlighted the seriousness of the denial of the right to vote for black persons and served to be a catalyst for voter rights registration. It brought together a rich diversity of the American public to challenge ‘racial apartheid in the USA.’ ”
Less than five months after the Selma march, President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law, guaranteeing federal protection and fair voter registration laws to every American citizen.
One of the people inspired by the march and the change it produced was Licitra. Even as a young teenager, he knew he wanted to be part of the growing social justice movement in the country.
“I was too young to be an activist, but I was old enough to realize that there was something very important going on in our country,” he said. “That profound sense from the peace movement and the fight for racial justice was always a part of what I expected to find in the church.”
Licitra, a Howell resident, is an interfaith activist ordained by the Christian Universalist Association and a board member of the Monmouth Center for World Religion and Ethical Thought.
Last September, after enrolling in the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, Licitra and 27 others took a bus out of Michigan and embarked on a “Sankofa” journey — one in which participants “look back in order to look forward.”
During the trip, which took the participants through Selma, Montgomery and other significant sites from the Civil Rights Movement, the 14 black and 14 white travelers paired off to share their reactions with each other. They visited the National Voting Rights Museum and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King pastored. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on foot and came to a memorial park strewn with garbage and in disrepair, Licitra said.
“I became very angry, actually. It was sort of like spitting on the grave of genuine martyrs.”
Remembering the lessons of the past, honoring the sacrifices and maintaining the work of all those who came before is vital, Licitra said, to ensure the nation does not fall into the same traps again.
When asked what King would be concerned with if he were alive today, Caldwell and Licitra said issues like income inequality, unequal access to health care, education, legal justice and discrimination based on sexual orientation would top the list. Other programs and initiatives, like requiring voters to have state-issued identification, are eerily reminiscent of some of the obstacles King was fighting against 50 years ago, Caldwell said.
“The voter ID efforts in the last election became a living contradiction and denial of the meaning of the Selma-to- Montgomery march,” he said. “The struggle to win the vote was hard-earned. We need to be able to use that, to hold politicians accountable, and each other.”
Licitra said that many faith-based organizations have begun to discriminate against others based simply on religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation, ideologies that are in direct contradiction to the religious communalism that gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement.
“It all comes down to human dignity,” he said. “Are we going to treat one another with the sense of dignity we wish to have for ourselves?”
While both acknowledged that large-scale social change, whether in 1963 or 2013, is never easy, Licitra said it’s possible as long as people are willing to stand up, even when everyone else is trying to push them down.
“Like Dr. King said, changes like this don’t come without agitation.”