Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March by Lynda Blackmon Lowery (review)

“By the time I was fifteen years old, I had been in jail nine times.” With that startling opener, Lowery draws readers through a wormhole back to Selma, Alabama fifty years ago, and a civil rights episode in which she played a direct role. Many readers will have learned about Bloody Sunday in school, and hopefully many will have perused the likes of Russell Freedman’s overview, Because They Marched (BCCB 1/15). Encountering Lowery’s frontline report of the voting rights protests, though, kids will immediately grasp that this eyewitness account is the real deal—a once-in-a-lifetime experience seared so vividly into the author’s memory that the emotional impact resonates still.

Growing up black in mid-twentieth century Selma, young Lynda Blackmon knew both the sting of bigotry—family and friends suspected that her mother would have lived had she received adequate medical care in the segregated white hospital—as well as the support and relative safety of the close-knit community in which she was raised (The Ku Klux Klan “rode through areas where they knew they could scare people, but they would not ride through the George Washington Carver Homes”). By thirteen, she had been stirred by the speeches of Dr. King (“We children didn’t really understand what he was talking about, but we wanted to do what he was saying”), and by fourteen she was regularly participating in well-organized marches with her schoolmates to demand voting rights for their parents, many of whom could not march on their own for fear of losing their jobs or even their lives. As the pace of the marches accelerated, so did the intensity of law enforcement pushback; youth was no longer a protection against being hauled off to jail—or even, as in Lynda’s case, being bused out of town and detained in a state facility without parental knowledge. Worse was to come: Bloody Sunday found Blackmon kneeling with the marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and then suddenly coming under attack. Burned by tear gas and suffering head injuries, Lynda was terrified by the brutality, but she was steeled with determination to march from Selma to Montgomery two weeks later “to show George Wallace what he had done to me. … I wanted him to see my swollen face and my bandaged head.”

Lowery’s narrative addresses just the questions a young audience is bound to ask. How did kids get out of school to march? Supportive teachers let them out the back door, and a rotating system of taking one another’s tests assured everyone who wanted to could march without failing school. How did they prepare for inevitable arrest? Pack bologna or peanut butter sandwiches, cookies, candy, and water (“jail food just wasn’t good”), and offer the police a name of a fictional character rather than your own. What’s up with all that singing? “Music is something that just stirs a person up. Back then songs were emotional tools.” Did they ever want to quit? “I was terrified. All I wanted was to go home. … I didn’t care if anybody ever voted. I just wanted to get home to my daddy so he could protect me.” Of course, Lynda didn’t back out after all, and by late March she was back on her feet, with her hot links and bologna and clean underwear packed, the youngest marcher to walk all the way to Montgomery. It wasn’t a straight shot to eyes-on-the-prize glory, either. The very sight of National Guardsmen with their rifles and bayonets—deployed to protect rather than confront the marchers—sent her into a breakdown that nearly got her dismissed...