Fifty years after first visit, nun with Kansas City ties returns to Selma

Fifty years after her first visit, Barbara Moore is in Selma again.

The 76-year-old Roman Catholic nun with ties to Kansas City plans to be among those marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge Sunday afternoon.

Moore was in Selma in 1965 as well, arriving five days after the events of “Bloody Sunday” and the day after a second march and the brutal beatings of three ministers, one of whom died.

A member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Moore was then working as a nurse supervisor at old St. Joseph Hospital in midtown Kansas City. She was among a group of nuns who came to be known as the sisters of Selma and arrived that Friday to bear witness and speak out for equal rights.

“It was a moral response,” Moore said. “People of conscience were indignant.”

Moore has been back to Selma many times since then, including visits to commemorate the 35th and 40th anniversaries of the march.

But those events didn’t measure up to Saturday’s ceremony headlined by President Obama, Moore said.

“It was just packed,” she said. “They were expecting 100,000 people.”

Moore arrived at the bridge Saturday morning four and a half hours before the speeches began so she could get through security and find a good spot to view the festivities.

One highlight was seeing U.S. Rep. John Lewis. The Georgia Democrat was a young civil rights leader a half century ago and helped the lead the march, Lewis became a symbol of the violence that occurred that day, his skull fractured by a police billy club.

“For me, he’s a living saint,” Moore said.

Before leaving in 2002 for St. Louis, where she now lives, Moore was chairman of the nursing department at Avila College, now called Avila University.

This story was originally published March 7, 2015 at 7:43 PM with the headline "Fifty years after first visit, nun with Kansas City ties returns to Selma."