By Effie Caldarola | OSV News

My friend Sister Mary Hogan told me that what she remembers most vividly about her experience in Selma, Ala., in 1965 was the “hate stare.”

Sister Hogan was a young religious sister in Detroit when then Archbishop (later Cardinal) John Dearden permitted his priests to respond to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King’s request for clergy and religious leaders to come to Selma. The day before, peaceful marchers had been met by violence from police and bystanders on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.