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My name is Sister Patricia McCann, 1936. I live just over the Hill, literally down on 5th Ave. at Carlow University, and for a lot of years, we have been connected through a program we have called McAuley Ministries Foundation, and we helped sponsor programs that are educational programs for young people, or programs for adults, or healthcare programs, that kind of thing. So I’ve worked on the board of McAuley Ministries for probably 20 years now. I grew up in a little town called Bedford, Pennsylvania. We lived in that town because my dad was a state policeman on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Then we moved to Western Pennsylvania when I was starting high school. And then when I entered the convent, I entered the Sisters of Mercy here at Carlow University. And so, I’ve lived in Pittsburgh for 65 years. I was 19 when I entered the convent. I’m 88 now. The history behind us is we were founded- our community was founded in Dublin, Ireland in the middle of the 19th century, and it was founded to serve the poor and sick people who in those days in Ireland did not have any access to schools or hospitals. So that’s why, all my life, I’ve been a teacher. I started out teaching in high school. I taught history and English, and I taught high school for probably about 13 years. Then I went into teaching college history, and I’ve taught history in college for 20 years and I loved every minute of it. I love teaching school. My most unique and most interesting experience from teaching and in my lifetime, I went on the Selma March with Doctor Martin Luther King. I was a very young teacher at Carlow at that time. I guess I must have been my second year teaching there, and our college got a letter from John Lewis. He was at that time, of course, also really young. He was like in- maybe 19 or 20. We got this letter in our college at Carlow. John Lewis asking if other colleges would join in the Selma March because they were protesting to get the right to vote. So we went with a group of students, there were students from Mercy, from Pitt, from Duquesne, and from Chatham. We had four bus loads. And we went to Selma, AL to participate in the March. I had seen on TV the terrible violence that happened in those marches, but I had never been in terrible violence. On the buses going there, they gave us training for how to keep ourselves safe if we were attacked by the police. So we learned how to try to deal with it. But we still didn’t have any sense at all of what it’s going to be like. It was a terribly violent march, terribly violent. I mean they were all college kids. We were teachers in college with these college kids marching peacefully, singing hymns, you know, and these deputized police on horseback attacked us, and they all had whips in their hands. They had these whips that had nails at the end of the-the leather coming out of the whips, and they were just going after these groups of kids, black kids, white kids, there were all kinds of kids there who would come from college all over the United States. We ran up onto the porch of the house of people who took us in, the black community there, and for three days that we were there, they fed us. They had us- we- we stayed on their porch for three days. And what saved us was Martin Luther King came, and when Martin Luther King got there, the whole scene changed immediately. The police knew the television cameras followed him, and they did not want this on television, attacking these college students. And so he told us, “You get in your buses to go back to Pittsburgh, do not put Pittsburgh on the front of your bus.” He said “Put on Atlanta, or Richmond, or the name of some southern city.” He said “You will never get out of Alabama if you put Pittsburgh on your bus.” For days, weeks after that, every night when I dreamed, I dreamed of these policemen coming after us with these whips. And you know, my dad was a policeman, so I had this feeling about policemen that they were good people. I have never seen anything like that. What it taught me was that there were things that I knew nothing about. I knew nothing about all of the awful prejudice and the restrictions and the racism that existed because I had never experienced that. And so it really was a life changing event for me. I think being a woman impacts my whole life. It just is who I am and now I’m thinking maybe I will still be alive to see a woman president, and that makes me really, really happy. I was afraid I might not see that in my lifetime, but now I’m thinking maybe I will be seeing it. I think- Let me say this, you’re all girls here. This is your time in history. It is, so pursue all the education that you can get because you’re going to have opportunities that when I was your age, we never even dreamed of. And if you pursue it, you have the possibility for really interesting lives and careers. I am very confident about the future when I meet young people like you. I say things are going to be fine, so keep doing it.