Selma, Alabama

My first visit to Selma AL was in 1962-three years before that city gained everlasting fame as the site of the Bloody Sunday racial confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, one of the sparks that ignited the entire civil rights movement in America. I was there to visit Concordia College-an institution of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The Board for Lutheran Higher Education knew that I was putting together a school system in Hong Kong and they wondered what lessons that experience might bring to the development of black schools in the South of the USA.

Concordia Selma had been established already in 1922. While it was called “college” my memory is that it served only students in grades 8-12 with a few in the first two years of college.

I spent the day visiting classes, meeting withy students and eating lunch and diner together in the dormitory dining room. At the end of the day I was in overwhelm. I was deeply disturbed and saddened at the very low academic level of the students-in spite of the extraordinary commitments of their teachers. Then I was very upset by the amount and quality of the food. I knew that the students in “my” schools in Hong Kong had much higher academic achievement-and even though they were poor refugees their daily meals were so much better than my new friends at this school

 As mentioned above this was not due to a lack of commitment of the teachers-nor even of the desire to learn of the students. It is just that the elementary school education was of such inferior quality that good high school/college work was exceedingly difficult.

I walked through the town. Even then I noted that well over half of the population was poor black. Now the percentage of the Selma population, which is black, has reached 80%

The President of the College was Walter Ellwanger a most remarkable man. He was deeply committed to racial equality; his family had helped found the Lutheran Human Relations Association, the first formal group in the Lutheran church advocating for our black brother and sisters. Dr. Ellwanger and his wife spent almost 20 years at this school and he did it all: taught, managed the dorms, raised the money, maintained discipline and even directed the choir. I will never forget that choir practice. Even though this was an all-black school the songs all seemed to be English translations from old German tunes and chorales. The choir was good, but somehow or other their mood just wasn’t right. And then at 9:30 pm Dr. Ellwanger announced, “And now, as always, we will close with the Negro National Anthem.” And with that the choir plunged into “Lift Every Voice and Sung.” The music got louder, the harmony deeper, the spirit moving, and the emotion transforming. I hear it and feel it to this day

I also remember my experience after that late choir practice. I went to the home of the President, a distinguished old southern mini-mansion. I was assigned an upstairs bedroom. There I finished readying the novel, which had been engrossing me: “To Kill A Mocking Bird”

The next day I met with the legendary Rosa Young who must have been in her eighties. Here was a woman with an unmatched devotion to black children in the south. She knew that the public schools were not available to many of them. The quality of their black schools was a shame. She started a whole group of 18 or more church-related black schools in Lutheran congregations and there, using all black teachers, she provided basic literacy for kids for whom this was otherwise unavailable.

(Side note: I visited one such school outside Mobile. I noticed that some children did not even have their own desk-and were sitting on the floor using a church pew for the writing surface. Fifty years later a distinguished educator Dr Vernon Gandt   delivered a talk at a national convention of educators. After his lecture we spoke. I learned that he was one of those students who used that church pew as his desk- and went on from there to a distinguished career after earning his doctorate.

Today Concordia in Selma is a fully accredited university of excellent reputation and even awarding doctorates in education.

Now and in the last decades many of the products of that Concordia in Selma have provided lay and professional leadership for the church and they are one of the reasons that that branch of the Lutheran church has more black among its membership and leadership that any other Lutheran group. Persistence, education and overcoming adversity continue to reap rich rewards!