They met in 1962, in the Albany, GA jail, two of the hundreds of marchers, including the largest mass arrest of religious leaders, all protesting segregation. When Rabbi Seymour “Si” Dresner reached through the bars of the adjoining cells to shake hands with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. a lifelong camaraderie was born. (Dresner recalled that before they started talking, King tapped on the cell wall, signaling to the young men in the next cell to sing so that their conversation could not be overheard.)
Rabbi Dresner died on January 13, 2022, capping a career as an activist that amassed countless protests, several arrests, three civil rights case convictions and stints in prison.
Part of our mission at the March on Washington Film Festival, where I am Artistic Director, is to honor the stalwarts of the Movement while they are still living. So I met Rabbi Si in person when he attended the March on Washington Film Festival in 2016 for an event held at the National Archives called Shared Legacies.
The evening also featured Movement icons Dr. Clarence Jones, Dr. Gerald Durley, the legendary Rev. C.T. Vivian (who passed in July 2021), along with Rabbi Ben Kamin, Dr. Susannah Heschel and Rabbi Jonah Dov Posner, with a special dramatic reading by Academy Award-winner Louis Gossett, Jr.
I can’t lie. Spending time with C.T. Vivian was a highlight of that year’s festival for me. He was tall and lean, suited and dapper, with a readily offered arm and an easy smile that was in sharp contrast to the famous news clip of him in 1965 vociferously schooling Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies on the courthouse steps in Selma, Alabama.
Dr. King famously said that the “moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice.” I didn’t think so as a young person in the 60s. Change couldn’t come fast enough, and I believed once it did, it would stay changed… a testament to the legion of raised fists across the country.
Decades have passed, and the assassinations of Martin and Malcolm, Hampton and Jackson then, all the way to the recent deaths of Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery seem to prove me wrong. But because of the Festival, and the many activists whose history I am learning first hand, I see that while lifetimes are short, life is long, especially in the service of justice.
We brought Claudette Colvin to the Festival several times, to recognize her accomplishment as the 15-year old girl whose 1955 arrest on a Montgomery bus preceded Rosa Parks by nine months.
Just last December we were thrilled to learn that her juvenile arrest record has been expunged. And in January, I read that actor Anthony Mackie will make his directorial debut in a film on Colvin’s life, starring Saniyya Sidney (King Richard) as young Claudette. After years of neglect, she is receiving her flowers while she lives.
Another friend of the Festival is Sarah Collins Rudolph, the fifth little girl in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, where a 1963 bomb took the lives of her sister and three friends. Rudolph, who still lives with the trauma of that fateful day, reminds us that the survivors of domestic civil rights terror have yet to receive acknowledgment or restitution from our government.
Last October, the governor of Alabama did issue Rudolph an apology and indicated a conversation about restitution would take place. And so we press on.
These accomplishments may seem small and slow, but they are another page turned in the tome of human history. When we reflect on the lives of these activists we must take heart, have hope, grab hold of the baton, and run on with purpose and power.
