To mark Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Journal News of the Lower Hudson Valley (my local paper) has a front-page story about Maryknoll sister Madeline Dorsey, who was in Selma for the events that became known as "Bloody Sunday." There's a powerful photo of Dorsey and other marchers -- sisters, priests, and white and black demonstrators -- with some background on how she ended up at the front of that group:

When she got to the staging area on Friday, at a vast grassy space near a public housing site next to downtown, she said a Jesuit priest on the march planning committee approached her and two other nuns.

"He said, 'Come with me' and he put us on the front line," she said. "We had nothing to do with being on the front line, except we were placed there."

The imagery — three white nuns among the black marchers — sent a message: This is not a black march.

You can watch a video online of Sr. Dorsey, who is now 96 and living in Ossining, NY, being interviewed by journalist Peter Kramer. As it happens, her life of service has other resonances with today's headlines -- she was working in El Salvador when the American churchwomen were murdered, and the late Robert White was ambassador to that country (read Margaret O'Brien Steinfels's remembrance of White here).

Dorsey's final mission was in El Salvador during that country's bloody civil war and the reign of the death squads. When four church women were killed by Salvadoran troops in 1980, it fell to Dorsey and another nun to identify their bodies.

Another one of those sisters who were "not just nuns," but "political activists," as Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously put it. Thank God for them.

(P.S. You can see more of Sr. Dorsey and her fellow pioneering Maryknollers in this New York Times feature, which I blogged about here.)