Linda Holmes: Foot soldier, Brown Chapel champion

Growing up in GWC Homes in the 1960s, Linda Holmes couldn’t help but join the civil rights movement.

It was all around her. 

Holmes lived eight steps away from Brown Chapel AME, her home church, and it was commonplace to be in the middle of mass meetings with famous civil rights leaders demanding equality from the famous pulpit. As a child, she even got to shake Martin Luther King Jr.’s hand when he was in town to rally for change not only in her hometown but in the country and eventually the world.

At 11 years old, she marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with thousands of protestors fighting for equal voting rights on Bloody Sunday. On March 8, she commemorated the 60^th anniversary of that day with other foot soldiers at the annual Foot Soldiers Breakfast at Selma High School.

Holmes didn’t get the itch to protest from her mother. A single mom of six children, her mother was a cook at the restaurant on Broad Street that is now the Coffee Shoppe that didn’t allow Black patrons inside. Her mom was afraid of losing her job if she got involved and she urged her children not to join when the call when out to boycott the downtown Selma businesses that wouldn’t allow Blacks to enter. But Holmes and her older sister disobeyed their mother and boycotted anyway.

Her mother, however, did support the movement by housing white supporters “from everywhere” when they came to Selma for protests, Holmes said.

Holmes remembers when Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot in a Marion restaurant and later died at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma in February 1965. That served as the catalyst for Bloody Sunday a month later.

“Everyone around us was so sad, it made us sad too,” she said over the buzz of other foot soldiers gathered for the annual breakfast.

“The only time we had fear was when the Klan was coming through,” she said, adding her grandmother would tell them to “fall down on the floor” while the Ku Klux Klan was marching and “terrorizing the neighborhood” and they would stay down until they passed by.

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Holmes was given many opportunities to broaden her experiences through her connection to the civil rights movement. A white priest sponsored her and her sister to spend a summer in Detroit living with a white family. There, she grew close to the family’s white children and learned that not everyone hates Black people.

“I will never forget that family,” she said. “That interaction changed my opinion of white people forever. Not everyone is filled with racism, hate and mean spirited. … Even though we stared hate in the face every day (in Selma), my mother never taught us to hate. It is something that is taught. That was a life lesson for me.”

Today, Holmes lives in Montgomery with her husband, Bruce Holmes, who is also from GWC Homes, eight doors away from Brown Chapel. They drive to Selma every Sunday to attend the services that are held in the fellowship hall as renovations continue to bring the 116-year-old church back to its glory. 

Bruce Holmes is Brown Chapel Chief Fundraiser and part of Sunday’s announcement of their receiving a $1 million donation from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The Holmes are tour guides of Brown, sharing its history with visitors who come to Selma. They also oversaw adding a historic marker in front of the chapel facing Martin Luther King Street that outlines the role Brown played in the civil rights movement.

Anyone can watch their services now that it is livestreamed on social media. Teens from area high schools run the equipment and get valuable tech experience that led one Selma High graduate to work at Auburn University’s jumbotron team running sports highlights at football games. 

Brown Chapel has a shop now selling merchandise that goes toward the rebuilding efforts and an updated website and social media pages.

Brown Chapel leaders hope Sunday’s infusion will pay for the next round of renovations and that they will be worshiping in the hallowed sanctuary where civil rights leaders led a revolution by January 2026.