(an edited version of this story first appeared in NOW magazine)
By Matthew Behrens
When
Dr. Martin Luther King issued a call for clergy to descend on Alabama for the
1965 Selma-Montgomery march – a landmark 5-day event marking its 50th
anniversary this year with numerous celebrations and a major motion picture –
Rev. Ed File was working as superintendent of a North Winnipeg United Church
mission. File, who as a seminary student had first heard King speak at Boston
University before the civil rights leader became an international figure, had
no second thoughts about entering the cauldron of violence and racism that
characterized daily life for African Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Indeed,
still fresh news of the high-profile murder of three northern civil rights
workers during the previous year’s Mississippi Freedom Summer failed to deter
File and others (including the late Toronto priest and MP Don Heap) from
joining the Selma march. In fact, those tragic events spurred him to take up
King’s challenge. “Those three young people had been very much in my mind, a
feeling of solidarity with them and what they had done and suffered as a
consequence, and how important it was for more of us from the North to go down
and join in what they were doing,” File says from his home outside of
Belleville.
 |
| Ed File in the late 1960s, during the grape boycott of the United Farm Workers |
King’s call came
after millions of people had been horrified by the televised images of what
became known as Bloody Sunday. A group of marchers led by, among others, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s John Lewis (now a U.S. Congress
member), was brutally beaten and tear-gassed at the infamous Edmund Pettus
Bridge on March 7, 1965. News coverage of those events interrupted a major
network screening of the film Judgment at
Nuremberg, and were as shocking then as last summer’s paramilitary attacks
on peaceful protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police shooting
death of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown.
File
immediately sprang into action, contacting a fellow pastor who, after having
worked in a Winnipeg church adjacent to File’s, had headed south to Louisiana,
where he was subjected to damaging attacks on his church after heavy involvement
in demonstrations against segregated beaches.
“We had kept in
touch and when I called him he was working in Philadelphia,” File recalls. “I told
him, ‘I feel the call that I’m meant to go to Selma and I believe you’re
feeling the call too, although you probably aren’t feeling it as strongly as I
am’.” File laughs, figuring that after a significant bout of first-hand
violence, another southbound journey was not necessarily top of mind for his
Philly friend. However, arrangements were made and, after flying down
separately, they met up at the home of a white Montgomery family hosting a
number of marchers.
Upon their
arrival, they were greeted with the news that James Reeb, a white Unitarian
minister who had also answered the call from Boston, had just been murdered
after eating in a black-owned Selma restaurant, the only one that would serve
marchers. Shortly thereafter, “the phone
rang, and someone made threats against the family for having white marchers
staying in their house,” File recalls. “The owner of the house calmly went to
his closet, pulled out a gun, and put it by his front door.” While the image
seems inconsistent with a movement often characterized as purely nonviolent,
such moments were more frequent than most realize. Indeed, as documented in
Charles Cobb’s recent book This
Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, the civil rights movement was also
populated by numerous armed self-defence groups, like the Deacons for Defense and
Justice who, from time to time, intervened when local or federal officials
refused to provide necessary protection for demonstrators or during voter registration
drives.
While there were
tensions across the generational divide of the civil rights movement – younger
people, especially women, were shouldering a significant share of the burden while
relative elders like King enjoyed the lion’s share of the credit – they were
smoothed over during the course of the march itself. File recalls joining the
march shortly after it began in a large park where he and his associates
gathered quite close to King and set out for the day’s walk. The only tension
he saw was white violence directed against African Americans and, especially, white
clergy.
“They were screaming
lots of negative, nasty things, especially to white people like me. As
ministers we always wore our church collar, and the police would yell at us,
‘You’re a phony!’”
While Selma was
one of the last large-scale southern marches of the civil rights era, File says
there was no real sense of the event’s place in history at the time. Rather, it
was another one of countless marches, rallies, and campaigns that had been part
of social justice movements for decades focused on full citizenship rights for
African Americans. For File, it was part of a continuum that would keep him
busy to the present day, agitating for everything from nuclear weapons abolition
and First Nations solidarity campaigns in Ontario to peace actions in Japan and
Taiwan, a country with which he has had a close connection for over 35 years.
Like many
participants in the civil rights movement, File’s role in the struggle was part
of a larger vision for transforming the world. Just before he left for Selma,
he was preparing to take on a new job that would train clergy from across
Canada in social development and community empowerment at the ecumenical
Canadian Urban Training Project for Christian Service (known as CUT, where he
worked for the next 20 years). The Toronto-based CUT program, which also
developed regional organizations in the Atlantic and BC, as well as a First
Nations leadership training program, led File to Taiwan, where he worked with
community groups for decades, beginning when the country was under martial law.
“The people we trained there played a major role in getting rid of the
dictatorship and forming opposition parties,” says File, who just received the
first ever Taiwanese Human Rights Association Award.
Fifty years on
from Selma, File sees the seminal demonstration as “just one engagement that I
could be involved with that I felt called to, and over the years I have had the
privilege to be involved in so many other projects like that.” He also sees similarities between grass roots
civil rights activists of the 1960s blocking highways and staging sit-ins and today’s
youth-led campaigns, like Black Lives Matter, that have engaged in similar
activities, from occupying the St. Louis airport to thousands flooding the
Minneapolis Mall of America just before Christmas.
“I try to see
things in the framework of the teachings of Jesus and the ethical ideals of the
world’s great religions,” he says. “Those ideals are permanent through the
centuries, and people who are touched by those or see them as the focus of
their lives see that it is an ongoing struggle for justice in what we used to
call the civilized world. I see steps that we had taken toward making societies
more civil are being backed away from. It’s horrendous what humans are doing to
each other all over the world when we have the resources to be inclusive and to
have equity for all.”
As File
contemplates seeing the new motion picture Selma
(starring David Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo), he starts humming the lines of one
of his favourite songs, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and concludes, “The
saints were marching in Selma, in South Africa against apartheid, with Gandhi,
with so many others, throwing nonviolence against violence. And the saints are
marching still in Ferguson, in Washington, in New York, all around the world.”
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