Burt & Hébert at the Selma sign (Photo courtesy of Auburn University)
When an unexpected email came across the desk of Keith Hébert, a tenured professor in the history department at Auburn University, he could have easily brushed it off and sent the email to the trash folder. After all, it was a message asking him to connect with Richard Burt, head of the McWhorter School of Building Science in the College of Architecture, Design, and Construction — what could he possibly want? Instead, Hébert went into it with an open mind, marking the start of an unlikely but life-changing partnership.
It turned out that Burt was working on a project to recreate the harrowing scene of one of the most pivotal civil rights marches in U.S. history, later dubbed Bloody Sunday. The plan was to march from Selma to Montgomery, and the group of approximately 600 foot soldiers (including the late U.S. Representative John Lewis) set out on March 7, 1965. It wasn’t long before Alabama State Troopers descended upon them with tear gas and metal batons, stopping the march right before the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The project was sparked by Burt’s visit to the Bloody Sunday site with Danielle Willkens, now an assistant professor at Georgia Tech. “We were shocked about two things,” Burt says. “[One was] the level of interpretation at the site — you had no idea at all of where the conflict had occurred — and the fact that it was just run-down.”
They started to recreate how the site looked in 1965 using historical photos and video footage, photogrammetry software, laser scanners, drones, and design concepts and technology.
However, Burt knew he needed to bring in someone from the history department to help identify historical sources and documents. That’s where Hébert and Elijah Gaddis, an assistant professor of history, came in. One of the biggest breakthroughs in recreating the scene came when Hébert convinced Alabama Public Safety to release some photographs.
With the scene mostly mapped out, the focus of the project then turned to identifying the brave foot soldiers who participated in the attempted march and eventually interviewing some of them.
“It isn’t just so that we can kind of etch their names on a wall somewhere like the Vietnam Memorial or something like that,” Hébert says. “It’s to help us better understand who were the foot soldiers, how’d they get there, how did this change their lives?”
This research project is ongoing, but eventually, they hope to create a website and include these oral histories.
What’s remarkable is that this collaboration goes beyond telling the story of Bloody Sunday and the foot soldiers.
“[It has] sparked all of these other projects,” Hébert says.
One project that builds upon their initial research recently won the People’s Choice Award at the 2022 ACCelerate Festival at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Plus, “Selma University just received a grant for half a million dollars to fix up Dinkins Memorial Hall, which dates back to an early history of the school,” Hébert shares. “I helped them write that grant. The only reason I ever met Selma University’s president and got to know them is because of this project.”
He is hopeful the story of their project can inspire other similar partnerships in academia. He urges faculty members to welcome new opportunities and explore the unknown.
“We all sort of have our research agenda and the things that we set out to do — our five-year goals,” he says. “Trust me, this wasn’t on any of my five-year goals at all. This is an interesting opportunity, and it’s been very life-changing for me, but had I just stuck to my narrow ‘this is what I do in academia,’ I would’ve probably deleted the message and never met Richard, but you have to be willing to explore.”
While the project was of scholarly interest to all three faculty members, it was also a labor of love for the town of Selma.
“The people who were there and the people who are in Selma — they want to tell this story, and it’s our job at Auburn university to help them with a platform to share that story,” Hébert says. “We’re really looking for ways to be servants to the community here.”
Burt, Hébert, and Gaddis’s work has helped tell Selma’s story and commemorate the bravery of these foot soldiers, but they emphasize that this isn’t just one day for us to remember.
“We don’t want to pretend this happened in a vacuum — there was all that time before and all that time since,” says Gaddis.
They emphasize that the foot soldiers participating in Bloody Sunday have much bigger stories than just this day. Many were career activists and carried on the fight in other communities. Unfortunately, the brutality they faced that day happened frequently, even afterward, but their bravery paid off.
“No matter who you are, there are things in the world you wish would change,” Hébert says. “[Bloody Sunday shows us] a world in which ordinary people — high school students, teachers, community members, ministers — came together and presented their grievances in a very organized, public fashion that really led to significant changes in the American system because of that bravery and heroism. When you look at the photos of that day, you see a lot of high school students, a lot of elderly individuals. The power of ordinary Americans to effect change in our system is real, and it’s still real today.”
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