Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past members and counterparts from California cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in pairs in Selma, Ala., on Monday in a manner reminiscent of how the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marchers walked. The five-day, 54-mile march was about voting rights.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — When Judge Carla Baldwin slowly circled the Civil Rights Memorial, her late grandfather, Roy Lee Clark came to mind — as did one seeming contradiction.

“My grandfather had a lot of quiet strength, but when he spoke, it was memorable. Maybe it wasn’t that he had nothing to say, but that he possibly felt he wasn’t allowed to speak,” Baldwin, of Youngstown Municipal Court, said.

Her grandfather, who died in 2017, was from Meridian, Miss., and lived through part of the Jim Crow era. He also served his country in the U.S. Army, only to have to stand up on the bus upon his return home from the base and be one of the countless blacks who were treated as second-class citizens, Baldwin said.

She was among the Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past members who visited the memorial, which was created by architect Maya Lin and contains the names of 40 martyrs whose lives were taken during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The participants also spent a portion of the day in Selma, Ala.

Joining the group were several dozen students and adults from California who are part of Sojourn to the Past, which was created in 1999 by Jeff Steinberg, a former Advanced Placement history teacher. After her first Sojourn journey in 2007, Penny Wells created the nonprofit Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past organization.

While slowly circling the memorial, Baldwin was most affected by the killings of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair and Carole Robertson in the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

“The four little girls got me,” she said. “They were about as innocent as you can get.”

While in Selma, the group heard presentations from Joann Bland, who began her activism in 1961 after attending a mass meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led, and Lawrence “Coach” Huggins, a longtime teacher in the Selma City Schools.

“Every time I’d pass by, I’d watch those white kids and wish it was me. My grandmother said, ‘When we get our freedom, you will be able to,'” Bland said, referring to not being allowed to sit at a lunch counter in Carter’s Drug Store with white patrons.

For her activism, Bland, an Army veteran and College of Staten Island (N.Y.) graduate, had been jailed an estimated 13 times by age 11. She also witnessed her sister, Linda, being attacked March 7, 1965, a day infamously known as “Bloody Sunday,” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, resulting in 35 stitches to her head. What she thought were gunshots toward the front of the 600 marchers turned out to be canisters of a particularly toxic form of tear gas called C4, which is meant to induce vomiting, she explained.

Bland, whose mother died in a segregated hospital awaiting a blood transfusion, compared social activism to a jigsaw puzzle, urging the participants to add their pieces.

“The puzzle’s not complete without you. You’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” she said.

Huggins, 86, a retired physical education teacher who began his career making $3,500 per year, recalled leading 105 black members of the Selma Teachers Association on a march in January 1965 to the Dallas County Courthouse to demand the right to register to vote. Jim Clark, the racist sheriff who often led violent arrests of civil rights protesters, tried to strike Huggins in the abdomen with a nightstick, but a washboard Huggins carried caused the stick to bounce back, the longtime educator told the group.

Huggins, who served in the military at Fort Hood, Texas, also recounted the killing of the Rev. James J. Reeb, one of three Unitarian Universalist ministers who came to Selma after “Bloody Sunday” at the behest of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

While returning to Brown Chapel AME Church for a mass meeting after dinner at Walker’s Cafe, Reeb was struck with a baseball bat and had to be transported to Birmingham for treatment. He died two days later.

While in Selma, the group also silently walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in pairs, and in a manner reminiscent of the 1965 marchers to Montgomery.

Ky Matlock, 16, a Howland High School junior, said she felt the spirit of the activists who took part in the Selma campaign — especially the late Georgia congressman and icon John Lewis, who suffered a fractured skull on “Bloody Sunday.”

The Selma experience has reinforced Matlock’s desire to be more of an activist at her school and take part in nonviolent protests when necessary, she added.

“Things are mirroring what happened” in the 1960s, said Matlock, adding she feels the work of people such as Bland and Huggins should be more widely known.

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