One of my favorite hymns is “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wishful eye; to Canaan’s fair and happy land where my possessions lie.”

It is this day; this Saturday, I will think about Annie Lee Cooper Huff and about her sacrifice and in my mind’s eye see her there in Canaan’s fair and happy land.

After writing the story last week of her passing, historian and author David J. Garrow and I exchanged messages. Garrow has written a series of books about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. His work is a staple in seminars about the movement. He’s a fellow at Homerton College in Cambridge, England.

Garrow kindly consented to my request. Here is what he wrote about Huff:

“Mrs. Cooper powerfully symbolized the thousands of rarely-cited African American women whose courageous contributions were absolutely essential to the success of the civil rights freedom struggle. When she lashed out, in late January 1965, from a waiting line of long-ignored voter registration applicants, at infamous Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, calling him ‘scum’ and sending him reeling, she made an invaluable contribution to the success of the Selma voting rights campaign–if not to the annals of movement nonviolence! The next morning, the front page of the New York Times and other national newspapers featured a photo of Mrs. Cooper on the ground, with two Dallas County deputies holding her down as Sheriff Clark struck at her with a nightstick. No matter who had landed the first punch, hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers all across the U.S. saw that Selma was a place where three white lawmen could pin and assault a black female voter registration applicant, and that photograph drew the first prominent national attention to the Selma voting rights campaign more than five weeks before ‘Bloody Sunday’s’ violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge created international outrage. Mrs. Cooper will always be remembered for the crucial role she played in first bringing news of the Selma campaign to the attention of Americans all across the U.S.”