There are times when one simply has to admit ignorance. My family and I were enjoying the scenery on a peaceful country highway in Alabama. Mapquest had indicated this was the most direct route between Atlanta, Ga., and Selma, Ala. We noticed, albeit casually, road markers and other indications that this was an area of some significance during the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s. We passed a museum-like building called the Interpretive Center, but we didn’t know what the term meant.

After we arrived in Selma and were graciously set up in the manse building next to the Selma Reformed Presbyterian Church, we then understood that the road we had just traveled was the road of the historic Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march. I felt that I had not given due respect to our journey and wished that I could have traveled it again. We had breezed right past the place where a white mother from Detroit had been murdered because she was transporting black marchers on the return trip from Montgomery. We had casually crossed the Pettus Bridge where state troopers had mowed down marchers on Bloody Sunday.

I was ignorant of many things, but part of my reason for accepting the invitation of the Selma RP Church was to be enlightened. The congregation had invited us to interview some of its senior members for the Reformed Presbyterian Witness, as these members truly are precious, living history. It struck me that my children should not miss this experience, and so we timed the journey so we could include them.

Staying in that manse next to the wood-frame Selma RPC building, on a main street near the heart of town, made us feel like we were a part of the history that we very much needed to learn more about. I knew some basic facts about the church’s history of being part of a Southern Mission of the RPCNA, knew that it had had a place in civil rights history; but I knew little of the rich story and noble Reformed Presbyterians who had made history.

There are so many parts of this congregation’s story that intrigue me, but none more than their attitude toward prejudice. The members of Selma RPC in the civil rights era were godly, upstanding, well-educated, unassuming, hard-working folks who weren’t looking for any fights. They had grown up with the awareness that there were hundreds of whites around them who truly hated blacks. They experienced prejudice and injustice every time they went to a water fountain, a movie theater, a restaurant, and when they considered schools for their children or a hospital when they were sick. Their children played in the backyards because the front yards were not safe from the Ku Klux Klan and others who might do them harm.

You might expect these Reformed Presbyterians to have acted in anger, to even now be bitter, or at least to feel triumphant about the victories they helped to achieve and their importance in those victories. Instead, we found subdued, gracious, unassuming folks who exuded quiet strength. I didn’t see followers of a civil rights leader or a certain cause, but followers of Christ. They saw their “lot in life” as a place that God had put them where they could make a difference for the kingdom of God. In that, they knew they would have success. And truly they have. To me, these unsung saints are the bridge in Selma whose story is seldom told. But we will tell it today.

—Drew Gordon