In March 1965 four young men — two Black, one Hispanic, one white — folded themselves into a two-seater Karmann Ghia in Oakland and drove without stopping to Alabama. One of them was Hare's father. He carried a camera, and the photographs he took are now a historical record in their own right.
Milton Hare was twenty, married, and a transfer student at the University of California at Berkeley — a descendant of a long line of white Adventist ministers and educators, raised entirely inside that church.
He arrived in the middle of the Free Speech Movement. Mario Savio was on the steps of Sproul Hall, the university was arresting students by the hundreds, and among the demands was the right to raise money on campus for voter registration drives in the South.
He did not experience it as a break from how he had been raised. He experienced it as a consequence of it: that people have a right to speak, that they have a right to vote, and that the truth matters. Those are Adventist propositions before they are Berkeley ones, and he had been given them by the same church that was, at that moment, running the last segregated congregation in Huntsville, Alabama.
He threw himself into it. He lined up lawyers willing to work for nothing and raised thousands of dollars in bail for arrested students. His grades collapsed.
At Pacific Union College a few years earlier, minority students had been assigned to kitchen and barn work and discouraged from rooming with or dating outside their race. Milton had treated the dormitory rules as a challenge rather than an obstacle, sharing a three-room suite that took men of any race — an arrangement devised by his friend Paul Cobb.
On 7 March 1965 — the day that became known as Bloody Sunday — state troopers attacked six hundred marchers led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Four days later James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister who had come south to support voting rights, died of injuries from a beating.
Milton and Paul Cobb heard the reports on KDIA out of Oakland while driving. They decided to go.
Will Battles had a new 1965 Mustang and had watched footage of cars being overturned and burned. He kept it in the garage. The transportation that remained was Milton's two-seater Karmann Ghia, into which four grown men were loaded — one in each seat, one straddling the gearshift and changing gear on command, and the fourth folded into the luggage well behind. The tallest of them was six foot three.
They left late on 17 March with two hundred dollars, as much film as they could gather, and press credentials issued by the publisher of the Oakland Post. Two thousand three hundred miles and forty-four hours later, having stopped in Amarillo to replace every tire, they reached Oakwood College in Huntsville.
Oakwood students had been told they would face discipline if they joined the march. The four Californians had not told the administration why they had come.
The students knew. Men gave up their beds and slept on the floor so the visitors could sleep in them.
On the Sabbath the four joined Oakwood students and a theology professor in attempting to worship at the all-white Central church in Huntsville. The lot was full and the mood was tense. Milton walked up to a car of white Adventists to ask what was happening and was told, without embarrassment, that the Black members had their own church and insisted on attending this one.
He answered that he had driven from California, that his car contained two Black men and one from Latin America and himself, and asked where they were supposed to go to church — it being rather more than a Sabbath day's journey home. They looked at him, rolled up the windows, and said nothing.
Paul Cobb and several students reached the foyer and were shoved back out of the front door by a deacon who swore at them. Cobb, who spent years working in the South, would describe it afterwards as among the most vicious confrontations he ever experienced — and it was with fellow Adventists.
The group formed a circle in the driveway and prayed. That afternoon, in a session with a visiting General Conference youth leader, they said all of it out loud, and asked the denomination to state plainly that its churches and institutions were open to everyone.
On Sunday 21 March the four drove the two hundred miles from Huntsville to Selma and registered as press. Dr King led 3,200 people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge — the same bridge where the troopers had waited two weeks before.
They had positioned themselves to photograph the marchers crossing. As the march began, they joined dozens of others in moving ahead of King and the other leaders — a human barricade, in case anyone was waiting on the far side.
A plane flew over the column dropping leaflets warning Black marchers that they would lose their jobs. White onlookers lined the route. On a trip to buy more film the four were set upon by a group of white men, one of whom struck Fernando Canales hard, having taken him for Black.
Others were not so fortunate. Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Detroit who had been ferrying marchers, was shot dead by Klansmen on the highway between Selma and Montgomery; the young Black man riding with her survived by feigning death.
After the first day the road was limited to three hundred marchers. Most camped; the four shuttled back from Selma each morning — Canales staying with a Black family, Battles at a church, Milton and Cobb in a Baptist sanctuary. They made about twelve miles a day. On the third day it rained from morning to night. Along the route, Black families came out of their houses to cheer.
On Thursday 25 March the march reached the capitol in Montgomery, twenty-five thousand strong. On 6 August the Voting Rights Act became law.
Back in California the four were heroes to the students and a problem for the administration. Some people thought marching was a worldly business a Christian had no cause to be involved in.
Milton Hare left the denomination for more than twenty-five years, in part because of how slowly it moved on the thing he had driven across the country about. He returned in 1992. He has spent years since with the Adventist Homeless Action Team, an interracial group that hands out food and clothing every week in downtown Oakland.
Paul Cobb went into voter registration and Democratic politics, and became owner and publisher of the Oakland Post — the paper whose credentials got four young men onto the road in 1965.
Milton kept the photographs. He copyrighted them in 2004 and published them in 2015 as The 1965 Selma March: A Photographic Portrait, with a foreword by Cobb. They are a first-hand visual record of the march made by someone who was in front of it rather than watching.
Forty years on, asked whether the church had resolved what they had confronted, his answer was that it had not — and then: “I'm still hopeful — and determined!”
The CNN documentary. The 1965 Journey from Selma project, with Cassidy Arkin as executive producer, built a book and documentary around the collection. A news special drawn from it aired on CNN’s NewsNight with Aaron Brown in March 2005 — forty years, almost to the week, after the march itself. View the project ↗
The full account. Bill Knott's article A Journey and a March, first published in the Adventist Review in 2005, is the fullest telling and carries all four men in their own words. Read it ↗
The photographs. The 1965 Selma March: A Photographic Portrait, photographs and text by Milton Hare, foreword by Paul Cobb (2015).
Because it is the middle term of three, and without it the other two do not make sense.
Hare's grandfather helped build the apparatus that won the Second World War and then held the peace through the Cold War — the weapons, the missiles, and the survivable network that became the internet. It was necessary work and it produced a machine of enormous power.
His son spent a week in Alabama walking in front of Martin Luther King with a camera, and years before and after it working against what that same apparatus had grown into. Neither man would have described the other as wrong.
What Hare took from it was not a politics. It was a method: that the people who change things are usually the ones who show up in person, that the record they leave is worth more than the argument they make, and that a photograph taken from the front of the march outlives every position paper written about it.
That is also the operating premise of this site.
Milton Hare died at his son Milt's house. Hare spoke with him there by video, on his deathbed, and made him a promise — not a comforting one, and not general. He promised to carry on the mission, because it was the same mission, and because his father's pursuit of consilience and his own had converged on the identical problem from opposite ends.
Every economic model has failed us. Capitalism, socialism, communism, autocracy, kleptocracy — each has produced concentration, capture or collapse, and usually more than one. Every political and governmental model has failed us too. Democracy, autocracy, theocracy, hereditary monarchy, libertarianism. They differ in who holds the lever and in how gracefully they decay. None of them has removed the lever.
That is the through-line from the bridge at Selma to this architecture, and it is why the work is structural rather than political. His father marched to make a system admit people it had excluded, which was the right fight and the necessary one. But a system that can be made to admit people can also be made to exclude them again, and it usually is, within a generation or two.
That is the operating premise of this site, and the reason the corpus treats justice as a design condition rather than an outcome to be argued for afterwards. The rest of the record →