by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer
Former members of the Selma Interreligious Project (SIP) gathered in Sewanee recently for a reunion and to honor the Rev. Frances Walter, founder of SIP. He served as director of SIP from 1965 to 1972.
In 1965, the National Council of Churches contacted Walter about carrying on the work of Jonathan Daniels, a young Episcopal civil rights worker murdered in Hayneville, Ala., while attempting to enter a whites-only store with a young black woman.
Walter rose to the challenge.
The 1965 voting rights march from Selma, Ala., to the state capital in Montgomery influenced Congress’s passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year; the 1965 bill solidifed the promises of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to end racial discrimination.
“The people around Selma weren’t enjoying the rights they helped to bring to the rest of the nation,” said Steve Suitts, one of Walter’s early recruits. “African-Americans were organizing themselves, and SIP supported and enabled their efforts.” Suitts was a student at the University of Alabama in 1965 when he joined SIP.
Ralph Knowles, a young attorney with SIP, was defending more than 2,000 black high school students who were expelled to prevent the integration of the public schools. Other SIP staffers helped blacks organize childcare centers and advised blacks struggling to find a place to live, putting them in touch with assistance resources like the Federal Housing Administration.
Eviction was used to punish blacks who stepped “out of place,” SIP organizers recalled. SIP provided the FBI with information on 70 black sharecroppers who were evicted because they voted. Unfortunately, only one of those cases was ever prosecuted.
“The FBI was not a friend of civil rights,” said Suitts.
Many of those attending the reunion talked about learning they were under surveillance. “It was amazing how much people knew about you,” said Martha Jane Patton, who left her career as a legal secretary to join SIP. “We were paranoid, and with good reason,” said Walter.
Suitts recalled escorting a black community member to vote and being threatened by a sheriff flourishing a baton and his rifle-toting deputy.
Black and white young people who fraternized were committed to mental institutions without ever seeing a judge, SIP members recalled. Knowles filed a suit bringing about changes in the law that stopped the practice. SIP went on to work to deinstitutionalize mental health facilities and to support and promote SIP-sponsored group homes. Said Walter, “We dealt with the pressures of the time.”
The work of SIP ranged from legal and technical assistance to helping alleviate job, food and housing insecurity. The women’s quilting co-op that SIP helped organize was so successful that the beautiful handmade quilts were eventually sold at Bloomingdale’s in New York City. When the women needed assistance with managing finances, SIP found them an accountant through the Black Muslims.
The black community’s appeal to churches of diverse faiths for help led Walter to christen the organization the Selma Interreligious Project, but most of the recruits who signed on didn’t have a faith-based connection. They were students, young attorneys and activists from the women’s movement and anti-war movement who answered the call to address yet another injustice. All the recruits lived in Alabama and were not, as the FBI claimed, “outsiders.”
All of the SIP staffers made countering injustice a life-long mission, and they are prone to downplay their accomplishments, instead praising the people they helped.
“Some of the greatest people who ever lived were the dirt poor blacks and whites who managed to survive and enjoy life in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And the world will never know these people’s names,” said Knowles.
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