A Pilgrimage in Faith

This post was originally published in the Richmond Free Press and the Richmond VOICE.

I recently returned from the annual Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage with Rep. John Lewis to Mississippi and Alabama.  Every year, the Faith and Politics Institute sponsors the bipartisan pilgrimage to learn about our history and the sacrifices made so that we can truly be one nation indivisible.

This year, the main focus was on the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi.  Nearly 20 members of Congress (including VA Rep. Eric Cantor) learned about the passionate work done by local activists and college students to help people register to vote despite enormous barriers in their way.  We talked directly to the widow of Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers at the home where he was assassinated in the summer of 1963.  We were joined by many of the Freedom Summer volunteers, including the brother of Andy Goodman who was kidnapped and killed with 2 other volunteers within days of their arrival in the state.  And we visited the hometown of Fannie Lou Hamer and talked to her friends and family about her passionate advocacy for voting rights at the 1964 Democratic Convention.

On Sunday, we traveled to Selma, Alabama for a service at Brown Chapel AME Church.  A commemorative panel on the wall remembered VMI graduate Jonathan Daniels, who was killed in Alabama as a civil rights worker in 1965.  The weekend concluded as we joined a huge crowd in marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, arm in arm with John Lewis as he narrated what happened in March 1965 as his group of marchers on the bridge was attacked and beaten by state and local law enforcement as they peacefully advocated for voting rights. 

The weekend was deeply spiritual--thinking of sacrifice and the deep faith of people who faced violence peacefully to help our nation be true to its principles.  But it was also joyous, as we heard again and again of the power of ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things. And I even got to play blues harmonica at the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, MS!

We can never take the right to vote for granted.  I learned this living in Honduras when it was a military dictatorship.  And I'm learning it again as many states are acting to reduce voting access today.  The weekend taught us all that the work continues.

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