Driving the Revolution

Read the introduction below the divider

by Rev. Lou Bender

I went to Alabama this weekend before last. It’s been lots of years since I’ve been to

Alabama. A text from a meeting on Wednesday afternoon, a call with my Presbytery office on Thursday morning, an opportunity that demanded I make room, a plane departure on Friday morning. The good folks of Alabama were in a jam over voting rights after a recent Supreme Court ruling and quick action in all the former states of the confederacy. Clergy in Alabama put out a national call for clergy to join them to speak a word of hope and truth to that situation. We Minnesotans learned only a couple of months ago the difference a national faith response makes during a crisis, and the Presbyterians here decided we needed to be physically present, among all who were also there in spirit.

Alabama is a hard place to get home from on a Saturday night. That fact eliminated everybody who had to be in a pulpit on Sunday morning. But I’m retired, physically able, and civil rights struggles are lodged permanently in my heart. So I filled out the registration form and got on a plane. Small gesture, really. Big adventure. I landed in Montgomery with a brand new clergy collar (resistance-wear, I call it), a change of clothes, and a toothbrush. No address for the church where I was to be in Selma by 8:30 a.m. No way to get there. Not even the name of the church. Not my usual way to travel. I did have a hotel reservation.

The first person I met was Hakan, the Uber driver who rescued me from the airport after I learned there was no hotel shuttle after all. He wanted me to guess where he was born, but I didn’t come up with Turkey. He likes it here. I asked if he was available for a trip the next morning, but he was working the late shift at his other job. He taught me to use the app to create a ride request for the next day, and to hope someone would pick up the trip.

Then there was Toria, the driver who assigned herself to take me to Selma. (She also picked up my airport run for a 5:30 a.m. flight out on Sunday. Do you know how early you have to retrieve a client who needs to leave on a 5:30 flight? Even in Montgomery, they tell you to be there two hours early.) Toria cleared out her front passenger seat, which looked a lot like mine, to let us talk for that hour without shouting. She learned more than she wanted to know about voting processes, gerrymandering, the Supreme Court, Bloody Sunday, and Presbyterians. She dropped me at a church door that looked a little like chaos. And yet she was at my door again the next morning to ask how everything had gone.

At Tabernacle Baptist Church, they offered me water and directed me to the entrance for the general public (which translated ‘no press card’). I took a seat at the very back. They made an announcement for all clergy to come forward. I went forward. The Committee on Ministry for the Presbytery had commissioned me on Zoom to be a good guest and neighbor, with me nodding silent assent from my seat in the plane. When my hosts gave instructions, I had promised to follow them. Clergy seating was on the platform and in the front rows, across the aisle from the Selma Footsoldiers, the still-living elders who were on the bridge as teenagers in 1965 and carried the history of that day to this.

I ended up on the platform behind the pulpit, but couldn’t prove it by the pictures because I was behind the speaker in every single one. I can identify the backs of heads for the U.S. Representative who was raised in Selma, the local head of the NAACP, every Black pastor in town, a number of Black pastors from out of town, the leader of every faith community in the area, and the former Associate General Minister of Justice and Local Church Ministries for the United Church of Christ, whose name I knew from Facebook. Lois sat on one side of me and Diana sat on the other. We prayed together for almost two hours. I got a little bit of video from the preacher who sang a new hymn to the tune of the U.S. national anthem. I wished I had been recording when another thanked God that we no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans at the voting booth, then asked God for strength to weather all the spines filled with jelly.

Somewhere between prayers, Diana asked if I had a car. I didn’t, of course. She invited me to ride back to Montgomery with her. She was going to the march there, and she had some place she wanted me to visit. I said I had been looking for a stranger upon whose mercy to throw myself. We exchanged telephone numbers to find each other, but didn’t even know each other’s names. I just knew she was a former nun in a clerical collar. She understood faithfulness, exclusion, and the spirit of the day.

When prayers were over, or maybe just beginning, the church emptied into the street. Entreating us to silence, the leaders still shouted to be heard. Bystanders along the way shouted supportive slogans, none of the hateful rhetoric of earlier days. Some of them joined the march. Many others were already ahead of us, ready to greet us at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Selma Footsoldiers were the first to greet us as we arrived, along with several hundred others. One more prayer, one more song.

And then, silence. They stopped the traffic on the side of the road that was still open. Not one soul said a single word. I could hear the rustle of a breeze in the trees, footsteps on concrete, and water running in the river below. We walked, our feet weighted with history, into a place where tear gas and billy clubs expressed hatred in 1965. Where people were repeatedly turned back under increasing violence before a court ordered continuation of their walk to Montgomery three weeks later to demand their right to vote.

Diana pulled up to that end of the bridge in her little white hybrid with Georgia plates. We drove in less than an hour the distance it took them five days to walk. We nodded to police on our walk from the parking lot, greeted the women sharing a line after a quick burger, spoke with the people waiting to pass through metal detectors at the Alabama State Capitol. We couldn’t see and could barely hear any of the well-known figures who came to Montgomery to join us in making justice in Alabama and taking it beyond. Departing the crowd, we found between the cool and quiet walls of The Legacy Museum the story of which we are now a part. Now, as then, the problem belongs to all of us. Now, as then, the drivers of the revolution don’t speak the fanciest words or gain the most recognition. They drive a silver sedan, a black SUV, a white hybrid. Tip them well. Buy them lunch. And through God’s grace, we will overcome.

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In early 2026, many of us experienced the power of solidarity during painful and dangerous times, as people flooded from around the country to join us in Minnesota as we protested the violence of Operation Metro Surge. Thus, when Zach and I heard about the call to Selma and Montogomery to join the protest of the (further) gutting of the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchisement of primary Black voters, we felt it was important to send a representative from the PTCA as an acknowledgment of the power of showing up with one another and working for justice alongside each other. 

TE Lou Bender, longtime participant with Central Pres in St. Paul, was ready to answer the call when we reached out for volunteers. Within 72 hours she had packed a bag, bought a ticket, and was boarding the plane as the PTCA commissioned her. Please read her reflections above, and know that we celebrate all the ways that our churches are acting and speaking for justice in these times. From food lockers to laundry programs, to protests and legislative and legal action, you (we) are doing beautiful and powerful community work. 

We are continually praying for our work together, and are grateful for Lou's faithful witness as a presence from Minnesota. When we commissioned her, we invited her to be a "good neighbor" echoing the powerful protest language of this winter, as well as both Mr. Rogers and the Bible. Not a bad combination! We commsioned her to carry this "spirit of neighbor" in her heart as she went, and then prayed: "may we continue to learn and grow together as siblings in faith, parts of this network of cooperative action we call a presbytery, and feeling the ways our neighbor’s lives are becoming more deeply entwined with our own. Help us trust and remember that underneath it all dwells the love of God that will not let us go. May we go out, believing this love is powerful enough to transform the world and ourselves, today and always."

May it be.

Anna and Zach