maybe you can read an American newspaper
Nearly every day in August, Middle Passage has started his morning the same way: eating some grits and bacon, putting on his walking shoes and hitting the pavement before sunrise. Roughly 20 miles of marching follows.
After walking hundreds of miles through Alabama and Georgia, the 68-year-old disabled veteran is now in South Carolina, on his way to Washington DC.
“I wouldn’t be out here if I didn’t believe in the constitution,” Passage said on a recent evening, having finished some chicken, mac and cheese and peach cobbler after spending most of his waking hours marching through the sweltering Bible Belt.
Even before he began to march, Passage had travelled more than 1,300 miles on a bus from the 881-person town of La Jara, Colorado, to the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. There he joined the start of America’s Journey for Justice, a six-week march that is both commemorating the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement and seeking to call attention to a series of policy aims.
Organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the march is taking Passage and other demonstrators on an 860-mile expedition – approximately 16 times longer than the three Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965 – across five states, to a finale in Washington on 16 September.
The NAACP arranged the march to drum up support. Using each state to highlight an issue, it wants to convince lawmakers to raise the minimum wage, strengthen voting rights, stop police racial profiling, and provide children with access to education.
As Passage said simply, that means “better jobs, better schools, and better justice” for everyone in the US.
One of the Journey for Justice’s oldest participants, Passage is one of few people who have vowed to march every step of the way from Selma.
“I’m just a foot soldier following orders,” he said.
More than halfway through the march, he said a half-dozen people were committed to walking the entire route. Along the way, anywhere from 20 to 250 have joined them, including a coalition of rabbis and highway patrolmen who offered protection on busy roads and interstates.
“We’re from all different walks of life, coming together for one common cause,” Passage said. “We’re working together as a unit for the betterment and justice of everybody regardless of race, creed, color, or religion. We’re all in this together.”
Passage, who changed his name to honor the slaves forced to make the harrowing journey, known by that title, from Africa to America in the 17th and 18th centuries, said he was marching to ensure the US constitution – and the prospect of the American dream – remained protected.
His mission was mounted in honor of his late younger brother, Reverend Dr Larry C Menyweather-Woods, a Reformed Zion Union Apostolic church pastor and longtime NAACP member who fought for civil rights. Passage fought the same cause while serving as a merchant mariner in the navy, working a supply line that delivered munitions across the Pacific to Korea.
Despite having undergone five open-heart surgeries since the early 1980s, Passage said he did not think twice about marching 860 miles. In particular, he hoped the Journey for Justice would force lawmakers to strengthen voting rights.
In June 2013, the US supreme court overturned crucial sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its Shelby County v Holder ruling, allowing individual states to scale back laws protecting access to the polls.
Lawmakers including Representative John Lewis of Georgia and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont recently proposed the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore portions of the 50-year-old act gutted by the court’s decision. The Democratic-backed bill faces an uphill battle on Republican-controlled Capitol Hill.
“Voting is the most important right we have,” Passage said. “It’s been altered. It’s harder for us, for the whole population of the United States, to vote.”
Aside from the memory of his brother, and the issues he cares about, Passage said his role in the Journey for Justice would ensure his two grown children and five grandchildren would continue to have every chance to pursue the American dream.
He was also fighting for the continued right to be with his life partner, Tricia, he said. Tricia is white, and their relationship would have been deemed illegal in many states in the early 20th century.
To continue having such opportunities in the future, Passage said, civil rights advances of the past must be protected. Each step he takes helps guard such gains.
“Everything changes as time as time goes forward, from the beginning of our nation to right now,” Passage said. “We’ve all got to work together to preserve what we have. It’s a struggle. Freedom is not free.”
