Left: Mary Leoline Sommer, BVM marches with
John Lewis (l.), present-day senator from Georgia,
from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. Below: Mundelein
College BVMs and students from Chicago arrive in
Montgomery.
Fifty-Four Miles &
Fifty Years Later
by Kathryn Lawlor, BVM
Fifty years ago, Mary Leoline Sommer, BVM marched 54 miles
from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., with Martin Luther King, Jr.
Preparations for the march really began
60 years ago. The morning after the
verdict from Brown vs. the Board of Education was broadcast on May 17, 1954,
a Memphis St. Augustine HS student
To walk with them in the civil rights
marches taking place throughout the country was one way to protest the oppression.
In a Memphis march 50 years ago, a Father
Bertrand HS student warned his teacher,
BVM Mary Kilian Pollard, “Don’t rub your
eyes when you’re shot with tear gas.”
announced to his class, “Hey, there’s no
more segregation.” One of his classmates
cynically responded, “Yeah? Did you ride
the bus to school this morning?”
Protest marches could have been predicted in southern dioceses when, at all
Catholic schools’ events, African American students and their teachers were
pointed to the end of the processions. It
hurt sisters to watch their students and
their parents cope with such blatant bigotry and life-threatening discrimination.
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S A L T MAGAZINE
BVMs Answer Call to Justice
Since 1963, African Americans in
Selma, Ala., had been marching to the
courthouse to register to vote, only to
be turned back by police. When Martin
Luther King, Jr. came to town on March
7, 1965, he attempted to lead nonviolent
demonstrators in a march from Selma to
Montgomery, the state capitol. Viewers
on national TV watched Alabama state
troopers brutally beat them back with
clubs, fire hoses, and dogs. Before Congress passed the Voting Rights Act on
Aug. 6, 1965, Margie Kelly Robinson, a
Canton, Miss., resident, said that every
time she went to vote, “They just tore up
my name and threw it in the garbage.”
When Dr. King called upon clergy
and religious to join him in the Selma
demonstrations, Mary Raynold Wilhelm,
BVM, a teacher at St. Agatha ES, Chicago,
answered. She spent five days, from March
11–16, in Selma residing at Good Samaritan Hospital, a facility for African Americans established by the Sisters of St. Joseph
of Rochester, N.Y., and the Society of St.
Edmund. She joined the successful march
to the Selma courthouse on March 15.
After returning to Chicago, Raynold
claimed it was an “experience of having
had to learn how to deal with tear gas
and physical pressures, to maintain peace
and charity in the midst of violence and
hatred, to live with a fight against a situation that is intolerable.”
When Dr. King issued a second call for
clergy and religious to join him in another
attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, Mary Leoline Sommer, BVM
responded. At the time, she was serving
as principal at Christ the King ES, Kansas
City, Mo., and was involved with the Catholic Interracial Council. The bishop of the
Kansas City Diocese, Charles Helmsing,