On a brilliant Wednesday afternoon just after Labor Day, nearly a hundred residents of Brewton, Alabama gathered at the town’s post office to honor Bernice Sims, a local artist.

People eagerly lined up to buy newly minted sheets of “To Form a More Perfect Union,” a commemorative philatelic series that recognizes 10 milestones of the 1960s civil rights movement. Though most of the stamps bear images of works by such recognized artists as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, one, “Selma Bridge,” is from a painting by Sims, who, at 78 and now in a wheelchair, may be the town’s most famous resident.

Simes likes to paint narratives rooted in the history she’s lived. And her story - aside from raising six children as a single mother - is that of a foot solider in the civil rights movement. In the 1960s she was a secret leader of the NAACP in Alabama (state courts had declared it an illegal organization). During the day Sims supported her children by working as a domestic; evenings she organized neighbors to vote.

“Those were bad time,” Sims recalls. “People don’t even know how bad. It was such a hard struggle. For a long time I thought that segregation was how life was always going to be.”

The image of Sims’ stamp grew from her recollections of the now-famous “Bloody Sunday” march that ended on the Edmund Pettis Bridge on March 7, 1965. As civil right demonstrators attempted a protest march from Selma to the Capitol in Montgomery, state troopers viciously attacked them.

Indeed, the events at Selma are one of Sims’ recurring themes. She paints the bridge over and over; it’s her way of making that nightmare moment come out right. In fact, Sims is a leading member of a movement that’s gained increasing recognition: memory painting, in which self-taught artists deject the history they’ve lived through.

Sims has had almost no formal art training, yet today her paintings are exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Memphis Brooks Museum - as well as on 50 million postage stamps. “I hope my stamps will encourage folks to get active again,” she says. “With all the bad things that happened on the coast during Hurricane Katrina, it shows how much we still need a movement.”

A Brush With the Past: Bernice Sims’ life has given her plenty to paint about

By Claudia Dreifus