REMEMBERING THE LIFE OF SISTER MARY ANTONIA EBO

Feeling Rebloggy

by Gloria S. Ross

When King called on the nation’s religious leaders to join the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march, Sister [Mary Antonia] Ebo was a Franciscan Sisters of Mary nun in St. Louis. 

She was aware that hundreds of earlier marchers had been beaten bloody by Alabama state troopers and one, a young, white minister named James Reeb, had died of his injuries. 

But she answered the call.

“If they would beat a white minister to death on the streets of Selma, what are they going to do when I show up?” Sister Ebo told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2015, the 50th anniversary of the march.
An interfaith contingent of 54 from St. Louis arrived in Selma on the morning of March 10, 1965, three days after what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” For safety, their chartered plane landed on a makeshift runway in a farmer's field.

The Archdiocese of St. Louis had originally planned to send only priests, but later agreed to send six nuns as well. One of the six was Sister Ebo... 

Sister Mary Antona Ebo, one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most reluctant but eventually most powerful converts to the civil rights movement, died [this month.] She was 93.

~STLPUBLICRADIO.ORG

READ MORE:
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/obituary-sister-mary-antona-ebo-one-sisters-selma#stream/0 

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