Foot Soldiers for Justice

Everyone has a role to play – for example, Betty Boynton in the battle for voting rights.

Tom Faletti with Betty Boynton at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, Selma, AL, 13 Feb. 2025.

On our February tour of civil rights sites and museums, I had the honor of meeting Betty Boynton, one of the countless “foot soldiers” who played a role in the Civil Rights Movement.

I met Betty at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Alabama.  The museum stands on the far side of the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. There, state troopers, including hastily deputized White civilians, brutally attacked nonviolent, defenseless Black citizens who simply wanted to exercise their First Amendment right to march to their State capital (Montgomery) and petition the governor to uphold their Constitutional right to vote and their God-given right to be treated equally.

Betty is a volunteer at the museum, which is hanging by a thread with little financial support to keep it open for visitors like me.  I only met her because of one of those divine “coincidences” that bless our lives: she was in the building to meet someone else for a private tour when my wife and I showed up.

Betty Boynton’s story

Betty was in Selma on March 7, 1965, the day that became known as “Bloody Sunday.”  She told me her story and encouraged me to share it.

Betty was 15 years old, too young for her parents to allow her to march to Montgomery but not too young to participate in the mass meetings for voting rights that were being held in local churches throughout that campaign for voting rights.  Betty recalled the vibrancy of the mass meetings and the depth of the commitment of those who attended.  All they wanted was the right to vote and to be treated equally, and they were willing to risk their safety, such as it was, to end the injustices against them.

In response to the intransigence of racist White officials, movement leaders decided to organize a march from Selma to Montgomery, a distance of 54 miles, to demand their rights.  State troopers blocked the march at the far end of the bridge, brutally beat the marchers, chased after them on foot and on horses as they retreated back across the bridge, and continued to bludgeon them with batons all the way back to Brown Chapel AME Church, the site of the mass meetings.  Betty recalled the chaos as the troopers pressed their attack into the town and how she ended up being shoved into a car to avoid being attacked.

The state troopers wounded dozens of people badly enough that they had to be taken to the hospital.  The most well-known of those was John Lewis, but others were also badly mistreated.  A woman was beaten unconscious, and a photo of her was included with news stories at the time, but many people don’t know her name.  She was Amelia Boynton, one of the organizers of the Selma voting rights campaign.  Later in life, after Amelia had remarried, Betty married Amelia Boynton Robinson’s son from her first marriage, Bruce Boynton (who also played a small part in civil rights history as the plaintiff in Boynton v. Virginia, a 1960 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to enforce segregation laws against travelers in interstate transportation).  Amelia is featured in the museum, and Betty was proud to have been part of her family.

Foot soldiers: The movement would not have succeeded without them

The museum has a display in honor of the “foot soldiers” of the movement – the thousands of ordinary people whose names are mostly unknown but who contributed to the success of the movement by their participation.

When we talk about the “foot soldiers,” we are talking about the masses of people who did not make the decisions, did not speak for the movement, and are unlikely to show up in the history books, but who made the movement possible.

Countless people showed up at mass meetings.  Thousands of people went to jail.  Some volunteered to be on the front lines of the protests, embracing the risk of being arrested, beaten, or worse.  Others showed up not to get arrested but simply to stand in solidarity: as witnesses to the violence and as moral support to those who were risking their lives.  Others were back home or back at the church doing the quiet, unglamorous tasks that made the mass actions work: cooking meals, cleaning up, making signs, raising funds, organizing actions.

The young people of Selma in Betty’s time showed up for the mass meetings and helped in whatever ways they could.

Betty was proud to have been a foot soldier in the fight for civil rights at the young age of 15.

Massive numbers of foot soldiers were needed

I have been thinking about two things as I reflect on Betty’s story.

First, everywhere we went in our civil rights journey, we saw evidence that there were thousands of unsung heroes, and tens of thousands of ordinary people who played smaller parts, in the successful fight to end the state-sanctioned terrorism and oppression of the Jim Crow era.

The civil rights story is the story of massive numbers of people who did their part, large or small, to stand up for justice and equal treatment.

Most of the people who made the fight for voting rights a success were “foot soldiers,” not leaders.  A movement can’t exist without a lot of foot soldiers.  Praise God for the foot soldiers who did their part for justice.

For what movement toward justice are we called to be a foot soldier?

The second thing I have been thinking about is that every movement for justice needs foot soldiers.  For what efforts am I a foot soldier?  For what efforts are you a foot soldier?

The world is filled with injustices, all needing nonviolent foot soldiers who will do their part to support the leaders in the fight for justice.  Wouldn’t it be sad if we were never foot soldiers, if we never had the privilege of doing the unsung but essential work that presses a society to conform more fully to God’s demand for justice?

When I was in college, and again in graduate school, I joined in protests and educational efforts supporting the goal of ending apartheid in South Africa.  At various times in my life, I have had the opportunity to raise my voice for those who were poor or hungry because of our nation’s economic policies, for the unborn, for immigrants, for an end to race-based police brutality.  At other times, my role has been as a teacher – still just a foot soldier but helping to educate others so that they might hear the call to be foot soldiers too.

The Bible is full of God's teachings about justice.  (See Justice and the Bible for a very short summary of biblical teachings regarding justice.)

The famous passage Micah 6:8 calls us to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.

In Psalm 82:3-4, God tells us to give justice to the weak, to defend the rights of the poor, and to rescue the lowly.

Who are the ones who need my voice in order for them to receive justice today?  Whose rights do I need to defend?  Whose survival is precarious until enough people join in a movement to speak up for them so that they can be rescued?

We need people of all types who are willing to do their little part as foot soldiers to move the world a bit closer to God’s vision of justice.

Those are my thoughts as I consider Betty Boynton’s story.  She welcomed the chance to be a foot soldier in the movement of her time.  Where is God tugging at our hearts to get involved in our time?  For what are we called to be a foot soldier for justice?