Let this be a week of remembering. Yes, this is the week that our world changed due to a virus. Our lives will never be the same, and in many ways they should not be.  Yet some things return and repeat, demonstrating that the work for justice and anti-racism is not close to completed.

On March 7, President Biden signed an Executive Order to use the tools of the federal government to boost and protect voting rights. He signed this last Sunday on the 56th anniversary of what is known as Bloody Sunday, when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked peaceful protesters fighting for the right to vote as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on route to the state capitol Montgomery. And our Unitarian Universalist history is bound up directly in these events.

Although Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, local and state governments continued to restrict voting access for Black citizens. In the few months before, Bloody Sunday, Amelia Boynton, a local Black activist, invited Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to join and amplify the effort to register Black voters. King and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to help. In the attempt to cross the bridge on March 7, former Representative John Lewis had his skull fractured and Amelia Boynton was nearly beaten to death. The protesters were beaten back. On March 9, they marched again and were again beaten back. “Later that night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.”

Because Alabama authority beat and tried to kill its people, the United States government protected the protesters when they again set out on March 21, arriving in Montgomery on March 25. But later that night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five and a Unitarian Universalist from Michigan to “help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members tailing her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.”

In mistaken belief that the past was passed, or in craven power-mongering, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and we have witnessed renewed and increasing voter suppression ever since.

As state governments all across the country attempt to pass legislation that will restrict access to voting, may we remember the blood that has been shed for the right, that Unitarian Universalists have given their lives to defend the right to vote, and that our values call us to work tirelessly for freedom and justice. May we answer the call. May we remember who we are.

Blessings, Rev. Rita (she/hers)

Indebted to a blog post from Heather Cox Richardson for the timeline