UC Irvine’s Center for Racial Justice invited Lynda Blackon Lowery for its From Selma to Now: A Conversation on Youth Activism and Civil Rights event, held at the Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway on Feb 12.
At age 15, Lowery became the youngest official participant at all three 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama — Bloody Sunday on March 7, Turnaround Tuesday on March 9 and the final march on March 21.
The Deconstructing Diversity Initiative, a campus program that provides students with training and experiences to better understand the history of race in America, sponsored the event in hopes of connecting student activists with revolutionary change-makers.
As attendees checked in, students passed out program schedules and copies of a pre-1965 literacy test that was given to Black citizens wishing to vote in Louisiana. The test was “to be given to anyone who cannot prove a fifth-grade education” and contained questions like, “Draw a line around the number or letter of this sentence” and “Spell backwards, forwards.”
Lowery, covered from head to toe in a cobalt blue ensemble framed with a set of matching pearl earrings, bracelets, necklace and fan, sat in the center of the hall signing copies of her memoir, “Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom: My Story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March.”
The event began with a speech by third-year political science major Mina Shin on student activism at UCI.
“We have to be confident in our ability to harness hope and weave hope into every aspect of our lives,” Shin said. “I see so much power in this room. So remember to speak firmly, steadily and with a bang, not a quiver.”
As Lowery took the stage, she sang, “Woke up this morning with my mind, stayed on justice.” The lyric comes from a civil rights freedom song.
She began her story.
“Before my 15th birthday, I was jailed nine times. Twice in a state prison camp. And I want you to know you are looking at a proud and happy jailbird,” Lowery said to the audience. “Why? Because I didn’t go to jail for hurting anyone. I didn’t go to jail for taking anything from anyone. I went to jail for what I believed in.”
Lowery said her story began on Sept. 19, 1957, the day her mother died from complications due to childbirth.
“There was an all-white hospital in Selma — Baptist Hospital — that had the blood that could have possibly saved my mom,” Lowery said. “But because they didn’t have ‘Negro’ or ‘colored’ blood, the blood she needed had to be sent some 96 miles away from Birmingham, Alabama.”
After picking up the blood from a bus stop, Lowrey’s father was told that his wife had been dead for 15 minutes. At 7 years old, Lowery vowed that she was going to change things.
“Nobody will ever have to grow up without a mother again because of the color of her skin,” she said.
Lowery was 13 the first time she saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak. Dr. King was in Selma to discuss advocating for the right to vote through nonviolent action. Lowery remembers him saying, “You can get anybody to do anything with steady, loving confrontation.”
For about a year after Dr. King’s speech, children in Selma trained in the principles of nonviolence by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. On Jan. 2, 1965, Dr. King marked the beginning of an organized voting rights campaign in Selma.
During a night march on Feb. 18, activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot twice in the abdomen and died days later. Organizers planned a march from Selma to Montgomery to show that they were “one, protesting the murder of Jimmie Lee, and two, [were] going to continue on the battlefield, nonviolently for the right to vote,” Lowery said.
On March 7, at the apex of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Lowery said she remembers seeing “rows and rows of Alabama state troopers in blue lined across the four lanes of the highway.”
The march was deemed an unlawful assembly. Lowery said she recalled one of her trainers, Jimmy Webb, telling them to kneel.
“I felt someone pulling me in the back of my collar, trying to pull me out of this kneeling position. And I was resisting,” Lowery said. “So this person bent over me and started jerking me back into him. Big mistake. ‘Cause his hand came up by the only part of me that wasn’t nonviolent — my mouth — and I bit him. And I heard the word n****r twice, and he hit me in my forehead twice. He then pushed me away, and I managed to get up and start running into this cloud of tear gas.”
Lowery said that for 55 years she believed she had passed out after that. She received 35 stitches that day, 28 in the back of her head. It wasn’t until an interview with CBS in early 2020 that she saw what really happened while viewing archival footage.
“I did not pass out. I fell down. And I’m sitting there looking at this Alabama state trooper kick me so hard I had come up off the ground. And next to him was a sheriff’s deputy. He hit me with something that looked like a small baseball bat. And next to him was another sheriff’s deputy that hit and kicked me. I was a 14-year-old girl. I wasn’t a physical threat to no one,” Lowery said.
Lowery paused and continued through her tears.
“What hurts me now is I could see the look on those men’s faces as they were doing that to me. And the look on their faces, to me, was the same look Derek Chauvin had on his face when he looked so arrogantly up in that camera while he had his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck,” Lowery said.
With tightly shut eyes and a hand on her heart, Lowery continued.
“And it told me — it actually told me — that from 1965 to 2020, nothing had changed. See, we made some political gains, and we made some cosmetic changes. And you now can sit together, you can go where you wanna go and you can live where you wanna live. But the most important change is the heart of man, and that hasn’t changed,” Lowery said.
On March 21, 1965, Lowery and thousands of others walked from Selma to Montgomery due to a federal injunction procured by Dr. King.
“Stories like Lynda’s are important for our generation to hear, especially during these turbulent times where we feel as though our autonomy and willingness to act and fight for our future [feel] as though [they have] been robbed from us,” Shin said. “Lynda has shown us that her story is not over. She talks about her fight in the past, but she is still fighting alongside all of us in this generation — sometimes for the same exact thing.”
Annia Pallares zur Nieden is a Features Intern for the winter 2025 quarter. She can be reached at anniap@uci.edu.
Edited by Jaheem Conley.