Honoring Jo Ann Bland’s Legacy

It is with profound sadness and heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved founder Ms. Jo Ann Bland, a lifelong warrior for civil rights and racial justice. Ms. Bland passed away February 19, 2026 – a day that calls us to grieve, yes, but even more to honor a life that was extraordinary in every sense of the word. She gave everything she had to Selma, to foot soldiers whose stories she refused to let die, and to the generations of young people she spent her life lifting up. We are forever changed by knowing her, and forever in her debt.

Born and raised in Selma, Alabama, Ms. Bland grew up in the shadow of Jim Crow – the American apartheid, as she called it – watching racism and segregation create devastating divides between people who would have otherwise been neighbors, friends and peers. Rather than accept it, she fought it. At eleven, she had already been arrested at least thirteen documented times for demanding voting rights for people. She was among the more than 600 peaceful marchers who walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday and were met with state troopers wielding billy clubs, tear gas, bullwhips, ropes and brutality. She saw a woman fall and heard her head hit the pavement. She passed out, woke up in a car, her head in her sister’s lap, her sister’s blood dripping from wounds that would later require 26 stitches. And still, she kept going.

Ms. Bland went on to integrate Selma’s A.G. Parrish High School, attend college in New York, and serve in the U.S. Army. When she returned to Selma in 1989, she co-founded the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute, and later started her tour company—Journeys for the Soul—guiding visitors from around the world through the streets where history was made.

“I am heartbroken to learn of the passing of Ms. JoAnne Bland – a freedom fighter and daughter of Selma, Alabama. It was Foot Soldiers like JoAnne who put their lives and freedom on the line for the right of all Americans to vote,”
U.S. Representative Terri Sewell said in a statement written in The Grio.

Her tours were unlike anything else. At one point along the route, she would take visitors to an old slab of cement where the original foot soldiers met before beginning their historic marches from Selma to Montgomery. She would ask each person to find a rock broken off from that “hallowed ground” and hold it in their hand as a symbol of their own connection to the movement and their responsibility to carry it forward.

“I have never seen anyone throw that rock down,” she said. “I’ve seen people try to get more rocks, but I’ve never seen them throw that rock down. And I give them a mission: When you see injustice anywhere and you feel like you can’t do anything about it, you need to go pick up that rock,” said Ms. Bland.

That was Ms. Bland. She didn’t preserve history – she made you feel it in your hand, and she made you responsible for it.

In 2021, she and CEO Kimberly Smitherman founded Foot Soldiers Park to honor the courage of the foot soldiers by finishing what they started. They shared a bold vision, reimagining Selma’s historical significance as an engine for economic prosperity sustained by a vibrant community and transformed into a model for racial justice led by the genius of youth. For the last four years the organization followed that vision, engaging the community, bringing together residents, leaders and partners to build a comprehensive strategy for impact and growth.

From the Journeys for the Soul tours to today’s immersive historic tours, Ms. Bland’s vision to preserve Selma’s history and educate people from around the world about the role of ordinary people in the Civil Rights Movement has become one of Foot Soldiers Park’s signature programs. She made sure the organization’s programs aligned with the issues she felt most passionate about, including youth development programs raising up new leaders, economic initiatives creating wealth, building civic engagement programs that reignite the civic culture that made Selma unstoppable.

For Ms. Bland, preserving the ground where foot soldiers gathered before the 1965 marches was an important act of remembrance. In 2021, she and Kimberly purchased the first parcel of land next to Brown Chapel Church where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. launched the voting rights campaign in Selma. Ms. Bland’s dream was to use this land and build a park, memorial and education center that will bring community visitors, activists and civil rights leaders together to envision, create and be a part of the next social justice movement.

“Selma should be a mecca for civil rights,” Ms. Bland often said. She described the park, memorial and education center as a hub where people would visit from around the world, where Selma would finally receive what it long deserved.

Many will remember Ms. Bland as a bold visionary. She was feisty, quick-witted and took absolutely no nonsense. She had a gift of cutting through pretense and saying things that others wouldn’t. On the subject of voting rights, she was blunt: “When you don’t use that [voting] power, you’re slapping me all in my face, and all the thousands and thousands of those who fought for you to have the right to vote.”

She had pointed words for the complacent: “That stuff about ‘standing on my shoulders.’ Get off my shoulders and do what you’re supposed to do. You’re heavy. I’m tired of fighting for you when you’re able-bodied and can do it, too.”

Beneath the fire was a woman who had deep love for and commitment to young people and believed that they hold the key to progress and freedom. She spent countless hours telling children and youth what too few adults tell them – that the Civil Rights Movement was fought primarily by women and children, that they already possess the same power the foot soldiers had, that they are the present of the movement.

“The more stories these children hear about the past from people who were there, it becomes real and not remote,” she said, “and they start to think about how they fit in the puzzle of social change.”

The puzzle of social change was her signature metaphor that will stay with everyone who met her: “Movements for social change are like a jigsaw puzzle. Everyone represents a piece. Without your piece, the picture is not complete.”

“Ms. Bland was an unflinching and unstoppable teacher,”
EJI writes in a news commemoration story.

Ms. Bland did not live to see the park, memorial and education center fully realized, but she secured the land, developed partnerships, attracted like-minded donors and built the team that can carry her vision forward.

“What people don’t understand or don’t think about [is that] the [Civil Rights] movement was not a Black movement. They couched it like that and wrote our history like that, but women didn’t vote, poor people of any color didn’t vote. The rights that [everyone has today] were fought for by people like me, people right here in Selma. And Selma deserves the best. Selma gave so much to this nation. It’s time for someone to give back. Let it be your time.”

— Ms. Jo Ann Bland, November 2025

She was a foot soldier, a founder and a force. Now, it is our turn to let her vision guide us and keep her spirit alive.

Honor her life. Continue her work.

Our founder Jo Ann Bland believed that every person has a piece of the puzzle – and without yours, the picture remains incomplete. Honor her legacy by finding yours. Learn civil rights history. Bring children to Selma. Support the work of Foot Soldiers Park. Show up. Speak out. Vote.

Read more about Ms. Bland in the News

• EJI: EJI Remembers Civil Rights Foot Soldier Jo Ann Bland
• The Grio: Joanne Bland, a noted Civil Rights activist who helped create Selma’s Foot Soldiers Park, dies at 72
• NPR: Remembering civil rights icon Joanne Bland
• AL.com: Alabama civil rights icon dead at 72: ‘Selma lost one of her greatest daughters
• Black Enterprise: Civil Rights ‘Foot Soldier’ Joanne Bland Died At 72
• Black Belt News Network: Selma and the nation remember Joanne Bland, civil rights leader who died Thursday
• WBRC: Civil rights advocate Jo Ann Bland dies
• WVTM: Joanne Bland, lifelong Civil Rights activist and founder of Selma’s Foot Soldiers Park, dies
• WAKA: U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, Selma Mayor Johnny Moss, III remember life of Civil Rights leader JoAnne Bland