Selma celebrates the life of foot soldier Lynda Lowery

On Dec. 24, 2025, Selma lost another of its giants. A gentle giant.  

Dr. Lynda Lowery had no idea what was in store for her as a child, but as fate would have it, she soon found out. And it took her 50 years to tell her story, her way. She was recognized in a Celebration of Life on Tuesday, Dec. 30 and interred at Lorenzo Harrison Memorial Gardens (Elmwood).

She was 13 years old when she first heard and saw the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak. When she was told by her grandmother that they were going to church to see “King,” Lynda thought she was going to see the German shepherd named King that she watched save people in every episode of “Sgt. Preston of the Yukon” on television. She had practiced how she would shake his paw and who she and her young friends would let King save. 

Instead, it was the day she met Dr. King himself, introduced to them by James Baldwin. She was mesmerized. And she was forever changed. 

One year later, March 7, 1965. Bloody Sunday. She was 14 years old. She sat in the 19th row at Brown Chapel Church. She wore a white jacket, black shirt, black pants and white sneakers. Gunshots. Smoke coming from the ground. Someone grabbed her by the collar. A jerk backwards. She bit him. He hit her on her forehead. Tear gas. She is struck again several times.

How dare a child join in on the business of grown folks? How dare she stand for justice? How dare she cross that bridge over troubled waters? 

The desire for change was already burning inside Lynda Lowery. Last year, she told children at Valley Grande Elementary School that her mother died in 1957 when she was 7 years old. 

“My mother died from complications due to childbirth,” she said. “She needed some blood, and there was an all-white hospital in Selma called Baptist Hospital. They had the blood that could have possibly saved my mom, but because they didn't have Negro blood, the blood my mom needed had been sent some 96 miles away from Birmingham, Alabama, by Trailways bus.

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“When I was 7 years old, I made a vow that when I got big, I was going to change things. And nobody would ever have to grow up without a mommy again because of the color of her skin. I didn't know ‘getting big’ meant the rightful age of 13.”

Lynda knew after the day that Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered in Perry County in February 1965 that she would be in the midst of something life changing. And as scary as it was to this teenager, she was allowed to choose to go forward and join the movement in a most profound way, a way that could have cost her young life. This did not deter her.

You may think that after all this, a person would want to shout it out to every news outlet, every ear, every church and everywhere. On the contrary, Lynda kept her story bottled up inside her for decades. She went on to become admired, adored and loved for her work in the community without even a whisper of who she really was at her heart. She was a gentle giant, a quiet hero. 

She worked with the mentally ill for 27 years at Cahaba Mental Health, caring deeply for her clients and meeting them individually where they were in life. Perhaps it was her therapy, too.

Fifty years later, it was not until 2015 that Dr. Lowery decided it was time to tell her story in her memoir that was later turned into a play, “Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom.” And her journey of teaching, lecturing and empowering in a brave new way began for her at the age of 65, a far, far stretch from 14.

On Nov. 7, 2020, Dr. Lowery was interviewed by CBS News for a special on BET called “The Boiling Point,” six one-hour shows about violence in this country that brought about new laws. When the interview ended, Dr. Lowery was offered a viewing of the archived footage they had from March 7, 1965. For the first time, she saw it.

She saw a young girl running into tear gas. This girl wore a white jacket, black shirt, black pants and white sneakers. A state trooper hit her so hard that she came up off the ground. Another hit her with a baseball bat. Another hit and another. This girl incurred 35 stitches. Dr. Lowery was looking into a mirror that she had not glanced at before. Live. Uncut. Unfiltered. She saw her teenage self, her story preserved.

Dr. Lowery was recognized and officially honored by Foot Soldiers Park with the Foot Soldiers Legacy Award. She got to see the fruit of her labor. She got to receive her flowers while she lived.