"He crossed the bridge at Selma, marshaled the masses in Washington, D.C., and struggled against any action or entity that hindered the forward march of civil rights.

The Rev. Henry Silva, a local resident and lifelong advocate of equality and human rights, died Tuesday. He was 83.

Silva was a student at Howard University when he joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. formed it in the wake of the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. He participated in nearly every major event in the civil rights movement, from King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., to the bloody bridge at Selma, Alabama, where police, “to keep the bridge open,” beat hundreds of marchers.

Silva was a lifelong believer in nonviolent social change, but he recognized that violence often followed the effort. He carried the scars of the movement, including one he received when he infiltrated a Ku Klux Klan rally. He often acted as a bodyguard for King and was at the Lorain Hotel in Memphis the day King was assassinated.

“You knew you were in a dangerous situation, but the adrenaline charge you get from listening to great preachers and great singing, took away the fear,” he said in 2005 of the Selma march and other civil rights marches. “It made you part of something bigger.”

Although best known for his national work with King, Silva never shied away from civil rights issues at home. When he moved to Charlottesville in 1991 and discovered the area’s growing drug problem, he organized marches through the city’s drug-ridden neighborhoods.

Silva also organized fundraising and relief efforts for church congregations victimized in a series of Alabama church burnings in 1996, helped black police officers petition for equal wages in 1998 and got involved in a variety of cases involving police brutality and shootings of blacks. He also worked to bring youth into the movement even as the “old guard” aged.

Although he was proud of how far race relations had come since 1955, he insisted they weren’t as good as they ought to be.

“People look around and they think ‘life is not as bad as it used to be,’ but life is not what it should be, yet,” he said in 2002. “A lot of the things that happened in the 1960s are still going on. There are subtle signs of racism throughout this country. There is still work to do.” (Bryan McKenzie, The Daily Progress, March 7, 2008)