DAY FOUR Wednesday, March 24

Goal: City of Saint Jude

 

 

DESPITE ANOTHER BREAKFAST of weak coffee and pasty oatmeal, the marchers set off cheerfully. Tonight they’d been promised entertainment. Then they’d sleep on the ground for the last time, get up, and march to the state capitol building.

Chandler borrowed a fife and began playing tunes, the piercing, martial notes traveling up and down the line of marchers. Students started a round of “Yankee Doodle” and quickly turned it into a freedom song.

Wallace said we couldn’t march
We knew he was a phony
Now we’re marching all the way
To make him eat baloney
Freedom fighters keep it up
Even though you’re weary
Freedom fighters keep it up
We love our Freedom dearly

As soon as the marchers moved out of Lowndes County, word was sent back to Selma. Everyone was welcome to join them now. Hundreds of people waiting on the grounds of the Carver Homes sped toward them. Joanne found a ride and came looking for her sister. Dr. King, who’d left the march for a day to give a speech, rejoined with his wife, Coretta Scott King.

Cars and buses pulled over to the side of the road, and people spilled out to join the line. By late afternoon, five thousand clean, energetic people had joined the three hundred muddy, exultant marchers. They inundated the last campsite, the City of Saint Jude, a Catholic compound of red-brick buildings on the outskirts of Montgomery.

Lynda walked into St. Jude, dropped down on the grass, and began crying. She couldn’t stop. She’d made it. “All that fear, all that pain, the anger that had driven me there that stemmed from Bloody Sunday was finally released,” she said. “I was in Montgomery.”

Three hundred orange vests were handed out to the stalwart marchers who’d walked the whole fifty-four miles. It dawned on Bobby what an honor it was to be given one. He’d been jailed more times than he could count. He’d walked every step of the way from Selma. These were more than just safety vests. Students quickly renamed them “orange badges.”

Len Chandler plays the fife to keep people’s spirits up, next to one-legged Jim Letherer, who stoically made the entire walk on crutches.

The tents had been set up in the big field behind the buildings. When darkness fell, the generator stalled, providing only enough power to light a makeshift stage set up at one end of a tent. The excited crowd surrounded the stage, sang along with folksingers, and howled in laugher at comedians.

Coretta Scott King was talked into making a rare speech. Struggling through the tightly packed bodies, she was lifted up onto the platform. Right now, she said, they were just eighty miles from where she had been raised near Marion, picking cotton on her family farm. She’d grown up with Jimmie Lee Jackson’s family, and his death had hit her hard. But marching with everyone, she wasn’t afraid, not even when they’d walked through Lowndes County. She finished with a favorite poem by Langston Hughes:

MOTHER TO SON

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.

But all the time
I‘se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin‘, honey,
I’se still climbin‘,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Joanne looked everywhere for Lynda, but in the crush of people she couldn’t find her sister. As she searched, she kept running into women from Montgomery walking through the crowd saying, “I‘se cooked a huge meal. Come home with me.” Joanne and two of her friends went to a woman’s house to eat dinner and spend the night. Lynda was invited to another. After dinner and a bath, she fell into a deep sleep. Charles and Bobby happily toughed it out in the dark, muddy tents.

Marchers fill the street in downtown Montgomery. Rosa Parks, toward
the center front in a light dress and dark hat, walks next to Ralph Abernathy.