PRINCETON: Student to take part in Selma march

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   Jerria Martin first heard of James Reeb when she started attending the Princeton Theological Seminary, how the seminary graduate and later civil rights martyr was connected to her hometown of Selma, Ala.
   Mr. Reeb, only 38 at the time and married with four children, lost his life at the hands of a group of white men in 1965.
   Ms. Martin, a senior at the seminary, plans to speak of Mr. Reeb when she participates in a series of events marking a historic moment in the struggle for civil rights.
   Ms. Martin is participating this weekend in an annual commemoration of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in which law enforcement authorities beat up marchers planning to walk from Selma to Montgomery in what became known as Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965.
   Though Mr. Reeb was not a part of that demonstration, the 1953 graduate of the seminary went to Selma right afterward in response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s request that clergymen come to the state.
   Mr. Reeb and two others ministers, leaving a restaurant, were attacked March 9 on a street by men wielding clubs, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. Hospitalized with a severe head injury, he died March 11, 1965, after being removed from life support. The death of the white clergyman stunned the nation, and is credited with helping pass the Voting Rights Act later that year.
   His sacrifice is remembered on a plaque at the seminary’s Mackay Campus Center. Seeing the plaque for the first time three years ago, Ms. Martin stood looking at it for 15 minutes. To her, the moment helped answer a question of why she was there in the first place.
   ”I kind of questioned why God would send me here, so far from my family,” she said Tuesday. “But I’m standing here looking at Selma, Alabama, on the plaque that’s outside of the main dinning area.”
   ”And it was, just like, wow. It left me in awe.”
   She recalled being raised with the motto of “we stand on the shoulders of giants.” Though she once associated that with African ancestry and men like Mr. King, she came to find it included Mr. Reeb too.
   ”But to see James Reeb and say I that I stand on his shoulders, that those are the footsteps that God is sending me here to walk in,” she said.
   Ms. Martin was a high school student when she came to appreciate the significance of the Pettus Bridge. The moment for her came in 2007, when she competed in a beauty pageant to crown the queen of the Bridge Crossing Jubilee, an annual event this time of year. It was also the time she said felt called into ministry.
   In addition the bridge crossing, Ms. Martin plans to walk with others from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, starting next week. According to the seminary, she will talk of Mr. Reeb on the capitol steps.
   Ms. Martin, a Baptist, said she was led to attend the seminary. As a college undergraduate, she visited to attend the graduation of her cousin, Eddie Martin. He introduced her to people on campus, and she recalled “hearing their stories of how they went to seminary here and how it really just molded them to be the leaders and the Christian women and men that they are today.”
   Ms. Martin, president of Student Government, is in her senior year on her way to earning a master’s of divinity. Interested in entering politics, she plans to return to Selma after graduation in May and be active in the community. She is already an ordained Baptist minister, and sits on the board of a local nonprofit, Black Belt Community Foundation.
   ”I feel like it’s my calling to go and give back everything that I’ve learned here at Princeton,” she said, “every lesson learned, every prayer prayed, to go back and do an actionable prayer, to put those actions behind the prayers I prayed to allow God to use me as a vessel when I get back to Selma.”