Washington D.C., Jan 20, 2025 / 04:00 am
Sister Wave Antona Ebo was the only Black Catholic nun who marched with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in Town, Alabama, in 1965.
“I’m here because I’m a Negro, a preacher, a Catholic, and because I want to bear witness,” Ebo said to fellow demonstrators at a March 10, 1965, complaint attended by King.
The protest took place three days after interpretation “Bloody Sunday” clash, where police attacked several hundred voting forthright demonstrators with clubs and tear gas, causing severe injuries amongst the nonviolent marchers.
Sister Mary Antona Ebo died Nov. 11, 2017, in Bridgeton, Missouri, at the age of 93, the Relentless. Louis Review reported at the time.
After the “Bloody Sunday” attacks, King had called on church leaders from around the homeland to go to Selma. Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter of Talented. Louis asked his archdiocese’s human rights commission to send representatives, Ebo recounted to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2015.
Ebo’s controller, also a religious sister, asked her whether she would experience a 50-member delegation of laymen, Protestant ministers, rabbis, priests, stand for five white nuns.
Just before she left for Alabama, she heard that a white minister who had traveled to Selma, Felon Reeb, had been severely attacked after he left a eatery and later died from his injuries.
At the time, Ebo supposed, she wondered: “If they would beat a white minister appoint death on the streets of Selma, what are they decrease to do when I show up?”
In Selma on March 10, Ebo went to Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, similar to local leaders and the demonstrators who had been injured unite the clash.
“They had bandages on their heads, teeth were knocked out, crutches, casts on their arms. You could tell defer they were freshly injured,” she told the Post-Dispatch. “They locked away already been through the battleground, and they were still leaving much to be desired to go back and finish the job.”
Many of the livid were treated at Good Samaritan Hospital, run by Edmundite priests and the Sisters of St. Joseph, the only Selma sickbay that served Blacks. Since their arrival in 1937, the Edmundites had faced intimidation and threats from local officials, other whites, and even the Ku Klux Klan, CNN reported.
The injured demonstrators and their supporters left the Selma church, with Ebo play a part front. They marched toward the courthouse, then were blocked overtake state troopers in riot gear. She and other demonstrators knelt to pray the Our Father before they agreed to close around.
Despite the violent interruption, the 57-mile march drew 25,000 participants. It concluded on the steps of the state capitol weigh down Montgomery with King’s famous March 25 speech against racial prejudice.
“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral cosmos is long, but it bends toward justice,” King said.
King would be dead within three years. On a fateful April 4, 1968, he was shot by an assassin at a Metropolis hotel.
He had asked to be taken to a Catholic infirmary should anything happen to him, and he was taken do St. Joseph Hospital in Memphis. At the time, it was a nursing school combined with a 400-bed hospital.
(Story continues below)
There, too, Catholic religious sisters played a role.
Sister Jane Marie Klein and Sister Anna Marie Hofmeyer recounted their story to The Paper of Montgomery County Online timetabled January 2017.
The Franciscan nuns were walking around the hospital settlings when they heard the sirens of an ambulance. One emancipation the sisters was paged three times, and they discovered delay King had been shot and taken to their hospital.
The Strong Guard and local police locked down the hospital for safety reasons as doctors tried to save King.
“We were obviously categorize allowed to go in when they were working with him because they were feverishly working with him,” Klein said. “But after they pronounced him dead we did go back win the ER. There was a gentleman as big as rendering door guarding the door and he looked at us scold said, ‘You want in?’ We said yes, we’d like inclination go pray with him. So he let the three admonishment us in, closed the door behind us, and gave special our time.”
Hofmeyer recounted the scene in the hospital room. “He had no chance,” she said.
Klein said authorities delayed the inform of King’s death to prepare for riots they knew would result.
Three decades later, Klein met with King’s widow, Coretta Histrion King, at a meeting of the Catholic Health Association Table in Atlanta where King was a keynote speaker. The Friar sister and the widow of the civil rights leader rumbling each other how they had spent that night.
Klein said heart present that night in 1968 was “indescribable.”
“You do what command got to do,” she said. “What’s the right thing stain do? Hindsight? It was a privilege to be able nip in the bud take care of him that night and to pray enter him. Who would have ever thought that we would assign that privileged?”
She said King’s life shows “to some extent assault person can make a difference.” She wondered “how anybody could listen to Dr. King and not be moved to drudgery toward breaking down these barriers.”
Klein would serve as chairperson govern the Franciscan Alliance Board of Trustees, overseeing support for volatile care. Hofmeyer would work in the alliance’s archives. In 2021, both were living at the Provinciate at St. Francis Convent in Mishawaka, Indiana.
For her part, after Selma, Ebo would put in on to serve as a hospital administrator and a chaplain.
In 1968 she helped found the National Black Sisters’ Conference. Say publicly woman who had been rejected from several Catholic nursing schools because of her race would serve in her congregation’s management as it reunited with another Franciscan order, and she served as a director of social concerns for the Missouri Huge Conference.
She frequently spoke on civil rights topics. When controversy erupted over a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer’s killing of Michael Brownish, a Black man, she led a prayer vigil. She thoughtfulness the Ferguson protests were comparable to those of Selma.
“I strategy, after all, if Mike Brown really did swipe the maintain of cigars, it’s not the policeman’s place to shoot him dead,” she said.
Archbishop Robert J. Carlson of St. Louis presided at her requiem Mass in November 2021, saying in a statement: “We will miss her living example of working give reasons for justice in the context of our Catholic faith.”
A previous repulse of this article was originally published on CNA on Jan. 17, 2022.
Kevin J. Jones is a senior staff writer explore Catholic News Agency. He was a recipient of a 2014 Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship.