Wounds heal. Scars stay.

On a recent research trip to Selma, Alabama, I found myself walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge trying to process all that has happened in that place. Most of what I know about its history, I’ve learned through memorial television broadcasts, or the movie “Selma” that premiered a few years ago. I thought they did a pretty convincing job of showing the hostilities of the ‘60’s and capturing the true darkness that reigned during that time. It made me angry. It made me sad. It made me glad “that sort of thing” doesn't happen here anymore.

And then I thought about Daunte White, Andre Hill, Manuel Ellis, Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Fanisha Fonville, Eric Garner, Michelle Cusseaux, Akai Gurley, Gabriella Neverez, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Tanisha Anderson, and countless, nameless, blameless others who have been bullied, beaten, and killed by authorities in recent years.

The stories of those people and so many thousands of others deserve to be told, not because justice will ever be done, but because those stories matter. Because people like me don’t know them. Because, surely there’s something we can do, right?

And then, at the foot of the bridge leading to the city’s center, I was approached by an elderly gentleman.

”You want to hear something, young man?”

I thought he was going to try and sell me something — a Selma magnet, perhaps; or a T-shirt with the visage of MLK, Jr. printed on it; something to remind me of my visit.

“Sure,” I replied, reluctantly, and smiled begrudgingly — feeling sorry for the old man who has evidently been relegated to selling civil rights tchotchke just to survive in this desperate place.

”My name George Sallie,” he smiled back and proceeded to tell me that he has come to this place every single day of every single week of every single month for the past 57 years. He wasn't selling anything. He was praying. He goes there to pray — for peace; for protection; for the promise of a new day; and for the people who beat him and his friends on that bridge on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.

”It’s all I can do,” he said.

Then, he showed me the scar on his forehead and continued:

“See up under that bridge across that river? That’s where Jim Clark and his posse was. Now, the man that hit me… I believe he was a civilian. Because he was on a horse. And when he hit me, I went down. He couldn’t hit me no more. But there was 72 people that had to go to the hospital that day.”

“And you forgive them?” I asked, trying to swallow the lump in my throat.

He smiled again: “It’s a command for me to forgive ‘em,” almost whispering now through the lump in his own throat, “because somewhere down the line, I’m gonna need Him to forgive me…” He shakily pointed upward with his finger, and then looked away.

Wounds heal, friends. Scars stay… and remind us… to pray.