Behind Every Child Brave Enough to March Stood a Mother Brave Enough to Let Them Go
Carrie’s Children: How One Mother Prepared Her Children to Become Selma’s Foot Soldiers
One Family. Nine Children. A Movement That Changed America.
In 1965, Carrie Louise Lundy made an extraordinary decision: she would allow her children — some as young as ten years old — to participate in Selma's civil rights activities, including mass meetings and marches that could cost them everything.
But this wasn't a sudden choice made in the heat of the moment. Carrie had been preparing her children for years — building courage through responsibility, teaching them their worth through daily acts of love, and showing them that true freedom requires the willingness to sacrifice for it.
Carrie's Children: How One Mother Prepared Her Children to Become Selma's Foot Soldiers documents what most civil rights narratives overlook: how one mother deliberately prepared her children to stand up for justice, and how those children — including twelve-year-old Clarence on Bloody Sunday — became foot soldiers in the movement that changed America.
This is the story of a family at 1421 Sylvan Street, three blocks from Brown Chapel AME Church, and how a World War II veteran's widow raised nine children to fly.
Publication Date: March 2026
Most civil rights memoirs focus on adult leaders. This book captures the rarely documented perspective of children who participated—and how their mother prepared them for that role.
How did Carrie decide her children were ready? What happened at the dinner table? This memoir documents the years of preparation that made participation not only possible but natural.
Behind every famous leader stood mothers like Carrie, teaching courage to the next generation. This book honors the hidden heroes who prepared the foot soldiers.
“My mother understood that true love meant preparing us to fly, not clipping our wings to keep us safe. She’d been building courage in us through years of trust and responsibility—the movement was what all that preparation was for.”
— Clarence T. Jones, Carrie's Children
Clarence T. Jones , born in Selma, Alabama in 1953, is the eldest son of Carrie Louise Lundy, who raised nine children with an approach she called “raised to fly”—building courage through radical trust and high expectations rather than protection through control. He grew up at 1421 Sylvan Street, three blocks from Brown Chapel AME Church, where civil rights mass meetings in the early 1960s planned the activities that would change America.
At age twelve, he participated in both Selma to Montgomery marches, including the violence of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965. He attended Saint Elizabeth Catholic School, taught by the Sisters of Saint Joseph—missionary nuns dedicated to educating Black children in the segregated South. For nine years, he served as an altar boy, learning the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass and the discipline of ritual. His mother, though remaining faithful to her own Baptist tradition, chose this Catholic education for her children, valuing the rigorous spiritual and academic formation it provided.
After the family relocated to Atlanta in 1968, Clarence earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Howard University. He built a successful career as an Electrical Systems Engineer and Technical Writer, in Automation, Software, and IT Industries. Having authored several technical textbook titles, Carrie’s Children is his first literary work, bringing an engineer’s precision to documenting how his mother’s extraordinary parenting made history possible, and mattered as much as the marches themselves.
His memoir documents participation in civil rights activities from the rarely captured perspective of the children who marched. It illuminates why his mother allowed her children to participate in mass meetings, sit-ins, and marches demonstrating how radical trust sustained the movement at family and community levels.
