Ms. Bland never stopped fighting to improve conditions for the people and country she loved.
Last month, civil rights activist Jo Ann Bland died at the age of 72.
While many civil rights era leaders left their childhood homes and gravitated towards centers of power like Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago, Ms. Bland returned to Selma, Alabama, a city where much of the downtown remains blighted due (according to Ms. Bland) to segregationist-sympathizers. She was less interested in her status as a civil rights leader than she was in all people gaining equal treatment under the law; her life’s work was to effect change on a personal level.
A mural in the Selma neighborhood that she long called home includes a telling quote from Ms. Bland: “It’s my belief that movements for social change are like jigsaw puzzles. Everyone is a unique and special piece. If your piece is missing, the picture is not complete. Why? Because you’re the most important piece.”
The mural reminds us that America originated as a movement for social change. It is, therefore, a complex, multi-million-piece jigsaw puzzle to which we are all invited to contribute.
One of Ms. Bland’s contributions came when she was just eleven years old, on March 7, 1965. Six hundred marchers set out across the Edmund Pettus Bridge toward Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black Americans. What met them on the other side of that bridge is seared into the national memory: Alabama state troopers and posse men on horseback, wielding clubs and tear gas, driving the marchers back in what became known as Bloody Sunday. It was a scene of such savage brutality that broadcast footage of it shocked the conscience of a nation and expedited the passage of the Voting Rights Act five months later.
Now pause and sit with this: two weeks after that attack, Jo Ann Bland—still eleven years old—went back across that bridge. Think about what that required. She had already been chased. Already been beaten. She had watched grown men on horseback try to crush the will of her community. And she came back. That is courage.
I met Ms. Bland in 2024 at a lunch where she spoke with a group of us about her decades of civil rights work and her ongoing efforts in Selma. I was fortunate enough to sit beside her, and even more fortunate that she had the generosity to continue the conversation after the lunch. Despite her age and health challenges, she was a pistol. Sharp, funny, and utterly uninterested in telling people what they wanted to hear.
After lunch, she drove me through Selma and to the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, which she co-founded. The museum sits near the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and it tells the story of the voting rights movement with the particularity and pride of people who lived it.
Several moments stand out from my time with her.
The first is when she was asked about the ongoing debate over renaming the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The bridge, after all, bears the name of a man who was a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a U.S. senator, and an ardent champion of white supremacy. Many have argued that honoring his memory with a landmark of the civil rights movement is an obscenity that should be corrected. Bland forcefully disagreed. Her argument was not that Pettus deserved the honor, but that erasing his name would be a form of erasure itself.
“I didn’t march across the Liberty Bridge. I marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge,” she said.
People can handle the complexity of history, she insisted. Children can handle it too. We do no one any favors by smoothing history into something more comfortable than it was. The bridge's name is part of the story, and the story must be told in full. Her instinct is a democratic one. A free society does not require mythmaking to sustain civic pride. Just as markets function best with accurate and transparent information, so too does self-government.
The second moment came when I asked her how she reconciled her military service and her protection of a country within whose borders she was so often mistreated. Once again, she didn't hesitate. The fact that something is imperfect, she said, doesn't mean you can't love it. It doesn't mean you stop fighting for its improvement. She loved her country. More than that, she loved the people in it, including people who had not loved her back—people who failed to see the image of the Creator in all people. People whose ill intent caused Ms. Bland to be arrested more than a dozen times before reaching the age of thirteen.
Jo Ann Bland spent her life giving to a country and a community that had made her earn every inch of her dignity. She did it anyway—out of love, out of principle, and out of a conviction that the work mattered more than the grievance. Ironically, had that love been extended to her by all the people of Selma, the world might never have known her name.
For those who believe in a free and flourishing society, Ms. Bland’s life offers a reminder: the work of reform is not necessarily the work of repudiation. It is the work of alignment—bringing our practices closer to our principles. And mature patriotism is not rooted in denial or grievance, but in stewardship. The American experiment depends on citizens who are willing to improve what they inherit, rather than abandon it.
