Ms. Barge

Barbara Barge was only 15-years-old when law enforcement surrounded the George Washington Carver Homes where she lived, in an attempt to stop voting rights activists from marching. Only days before, there had been a national outcry when state troopers brutally assaulted demonstrators crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand Black people’s voting rights. This time, the police, under the Alabama governor’s orders, roped off the direct path to the bridge aiming to intimidate people like Barbara from further escalation.

The tactic fell flat though, as she and her neighbors began calling the barrier the “Berlin Wall” or “Selma Wall” – referencing the routine and widely condemned violence occurring at the Berlin Wall in Germany during the Cold War. They improvised new verses to the tune of a popular spiritual, singing about the hate behind building the wall and pledging to continue protesting until it fell. The next day, the line was cut, and several days later the successful march to Montgomery happened.

Ms. Barge only recently started sharing her experience from that day, and what it was like to regularly stand up to violence and intimidation at such a young age.

“I realized there wouldn’t have been a movement without many bodies like me,” she says. “So it’s very important, especially for the local kids, to understand the impact that the movement in Selma had not only on Selma, but on the nation.”

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