As I watched the cart carrying the body of John Lewis across the Pettus Bridge, I was reminded that in 1965, brutally beaten, Lewis was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, run by Sisters of St. Joseph — the only one in nine counties that received Black patients.
The civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson had died there two and a half weeks before.
Sister Barbara Lum remembers that every day, when she visited, he took her hand and said, "Sister, don't you think this is a high price to pay for freedom?"
Sisters of St. Joseph came from Rochester, New York, to Selma in 1940 to work with African Americans in the viciously segregated city.
On Bloody Sunday, when they heard by radio what was happening at the Pettus Bridge, all the sisters rushed to the hospital. About 100 people were brought in, with injuries from tear gas to trampled bones. John Lewis had a fractured skull.
Sister Barbara said, “I remember coming out into the hall for some reason... and people identified him. 'That’s John Lewis, lying on the stretcher, waiting to be taken up and admitted into the hospital.' And he still had his raincoat on, and he was just lying there totally quiet, probably unconscious.”
Five decades later, Lewis addressed the graduates of the Rochester Educational Opportunity Center, where Sister Barbara was a faculty member.
Overcome with emotion, he said, "Thank you to Sister Barbara and all the SSJs — thank you for what you did on March 7, 1965, and before and after... I was wounded, hit in the head and thought I was going to die. I thought to myself, How can President Johnson send more troops to Vietnam, but not send troops to Selma to protect us? You took care of a lot of people that day and I have been wanting to come here for a long time and say thank you.”
Two years after that, visiting their Rochester motherhouse, Lewis thanked the sisters once more. A number who’d been in Selma were there to hear him, some in wheelchairs.
All the questions of Selma are with us again. Sisters, much older and fewer, are asking ourselves just how we can be there now.
Patricia Byrne is a Sister of Saint Joseph. She taught religious history at Trinity College in Hartford for many years and still lives in the area.
