Selma, 1965

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who organized the Selma march, sent a call for nonviolent protesters, stating, “calling on religious leaders from all over the nation to join us on Tuesday in our peaceful, nonviolent march for freedom” (“Selma to Montgomery March.” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Stanford University.). Freedom is a key theme in “Selma, 1965”: a poem deeply rooted in the civil rights era and the fight for equal rights for African Americans. Alluding to freedom in Line 8, the speaker describes watching the march come through the hot summer in Selma “From the freedom school window” (Line 8). Historically, Freedom Schools were developed by the SNCC with the aim of countering the “sharecropper education” so many African Americans and poor whites received in states like Alabama and Mississippi (Christian, Nichole. A Life Speaks. 2019. The Kresge Foundation.). The concept of freedom extends far beyond the name of the school in the poem; the children, who appear in the line before the freedom school, bolster the school’s teaching since the children sing songs of abolitionism and freedom: “Before I’d be a slave, / I’d be buried in my grave…” (Lines 6-7).