"A Sound Mind and a Sound Body": The
Don Bosco Boys Club of Selma, Alabama, 1947–1964
R. BENTLEY ANDERSON
SELMA, ALABAMA. This southern city conjures up particular images in the
collective memory of America society: protesting marchers and the Edmund
Pettits bridge, tear gas and riot police. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's historic 1965 march on
Montgomery began in Selma, and from that moment, Selma and the modern
Civil Rights Movement became synonymous. But there was a Selma before
1965. A southern town on the banks of the Alabama River, Selma, the county
seat of Dallas County, was a location and a state of mind. Selma was cotton
and segregation, set adrift in attitudes and practices of life and religion
that astonish today. Selma was at once fervently Christian and rigidly
segregationist. It was taken for granted that there were white Protestant
churches and black ones. Even though it was the heart of the Bible belt,
Selma had a Catholic presence, also divided along racial lines, one parish
for blacks and one for whites.
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