By Joseph Rembert

Pastor of New Beginnings Christian Center. 

Someone once defined history as an event that never happened, written by a person who wasn’t there. Perhaps that definition of history is a bit extreme — however, the specious renderings of some events of history do cause us to offer amendments to make truth more visible.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson brought the house down when he told a story about him and President Ronald Reagan going fishing one day. He stated, “Things were going well until the wind blew the president’s hat off his head and into the river. I stepped out of the boat, walked across the river, retrieved the hat, and placed it on the president’s head completely dry. The next day, the news headline read, ‘Jesse Can’t Swim.’”

In all of the facts of history presented, many of our heroes could fall from grace while others who were considered zeros would be elevated to hero status. Two examples of unsung heroes from the civil rights movement are the Rev. R.B. Cottonreader and Bishop Isaiah Hamilton Bonner.

When a retarded black man, Tommy Lee Hines, was arrested for raping a white woman in Decatur, Ala., Cottonreader became the point man for SCLC. He stood alone, preaching about the injustice prior to Dr. Joseph Lowery’s arrival with his non-violent troopers. The Montgomery Advertiser showed a picture of Cottonreader standing in the midst if uniformed Klansmen. He was listed as an unknown black man in the caption.

Violence erupted on the streets of Decatur as competing marches by SCLC and the Ku Klux Klan took place concurrently. Mrs. Evelyn Lowery barely escaped being shot during the violence that ensued on her birthday.

A Decatur minister told me that people knew who actually committed the rape and it was surely not Mr. Hines. I told him if that were true, those people who refused to expose the real rapist were worse than the Klan. The news cameras rolled as Klan leader David Dukes and Dr. Lowery boarded a plane after the violence. There was no mention of Cottonreader, except from SCLC leaders who knew the importance of his role in the movement. Perhaps there is a plaque or monument somewhere in the world that bears his name.

During the voting rights struggle in Selma, Ala., a number of churches that had been sites of mass meetings shut their doors to the movement after a court injunction prohibited mass meetings in churches. The Rev. P.H. Lewis, pastor of Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church is credited with defying the injunction.

In his book, he claimed to have threatened Bishop Bonner, the presiding prelate of A.M.E. churches in Alabama with bad publicity if he tried to force the closing of the church’s doors.

The Rev. A.R. Ray, and A.M.E. church minister, told me that Bishop Bonner, after seeing all of the protestors of the disenfranchisement standing outside the church, sent him to tell Lewis that Brown Chapel was not owned by a judge and ordered Lewis to open the doors. Ray, like Lewis, is now deceased and cannot share in a debate over the historical facts.

During the mid 1980s I traveled by car with the Rev. F.D. Reese to a national SCLC meeting in Atlanta, Ga. Dr. Reese, a true leader of the movement, told me that Lewis stated his reservations about defying the injunction and said that he would have to ask Bishop Bonner. Dr. Reese is still alive.

Former Selma Mayor Joseph T. Smitherman told me that Bishop Bonner was one of the biggest headaches that he and the white citizens’ council faced during the movement. He showed me a stack of bond receipts he kept in his office. Smitherman told me that although Bonner was too old to march, he would post bail for marchers as quickly as they could put them in jail.

I successfully appealed to Mrs. Mary Driggers to have Bishop Bonner’s contribution to the voting rights movement listed on the walking trail alongside Lewis’.

The information is damaged by weather or some other force and cannot be read. I hope that the city and/or the pastor and members of Brown Chapel will repair the marker.

Many people, black and white, have exceptional contributions to society. They didn’t do it for public recognition, but simply because it was the right thing to do. Their selfless acts deserve an occasional mentioning.