Joanne Bland spoke with students at Chadbourne Residential Hall Monday about her experience as one of the first eight African-American students to attend the first racially integrated high school in Selma, Ala.
Bland, active in the 1960s civil rights movement in Selma, was jailed for the first of 13 times in 1963 at the age of eight. Under the guidance of her grandmother, she participated in a protest against school segregation by boarding a school bus with other African-American children and was taken to jail.
Craig Werner, a UW-Madison African-American studies professor, explained that Bland continues to embody the spirit of the civil rights movement.
'She is, in her experience and the things she's doing right now, carrying on that tradition in the most serious way imaginable,' Werner said.
Bland described the brutal scene of a 1968 march on the Maryland courthouse, when police beat back the crowd with billy clubs.
'It was the screams I remember the most,' Bland recalls. 'They were just beating people, and people were screaming and screaming. You could hear the bones breaking.'
According to Werner, Selma's Voting Rights Museum is one of the country's finest and most evocative testaments to the civil rights movement.
'For the vast majority of the African-Americans in the United States, the movement was something that was lived out and fought out day by day in the communities where they lived, and the Voting Rights Museum places that story at the center,' Werner said.
When asked what students should focus on in the fight for racial equality, Bland acknowledged the difficulty of getting people together, saying that racial issues are not as simple today, and there is more division among activists regarding which causes people should support.
She encouraged students to conquer their fears and reach across boundaries to create an inter-cultural dialogue about race relations.
'It keeps me fighting to make this world right,' said Bland. 'If we all cease to struggle making this world right, our children and grandchildren will have to live in this messed-up world. That's why I continue.'
