TWENTY-ONE 

SELMA, ALABAMA, AND THE 1965 VOTING RIGHTS ACT

SELMA, LIKE MONTGOMERY, had a powerful white political machine that dominated its politics. The first Alabama chapter of the White Citizens’ Council was established in Selma. It quickly grew to thirteen hundred members and established a close relationship with the Selma city government, the county Democratic Party, and state and county elected officials. By 1958, the party chairman boasted that since the White Citizens’ Council had been established, only one nonmember had been elected to office. Able to stifle all dissent among whites—if indeed there was any—it had not been able to keep Blacks from complaining about, or acting to improve, the conditions under which they lived.

In November 1955, Alabama governor James Folsom named James G. Clark sheriff in Dallas County to fill a vacancy caused by the death of the elected sheriff. Wilson Baker, a South Carolina native and charter member of the Selma White Citizens’ Council, joined the Selma police force in 1940 and worked his way up to captain. Clark was just the sort of political appointee that Baker resented—one with no training or experience. When Clark ran for election in 1958, Baker resigned from the police force to run against him. In a runoff, Clark portrayed Baker as the tool of the city machine—and easily won.

Joseph Smitherman, who had grown up in a poor white section of the city, was elected to the council in 1960 and, in 1964, successfully ran for mayor. Only about two hundred of Selma’s six thousand voters were Black; he carried nearly every one. The most significant act he performed after the election was to name Wilson Baker to the newly created position of director of public safety.

The White Citizens’ Council dominated Selma politics, and tilted it to the right. Allowing for such a tilt, Smitherman and Baker represented moderation; Clark was a racial extremist. In 1961, the Department of Justice had filed a lawsuit against the Dallas County registration board. Only 0.9 percent of the eligible Blacks in Selma were registered to vote. That suit had little success. In 1963, the Justice Department filed suit against Sheriff Clark and the local registration board to keep them from threatening and intimidating would-be voters. A conservative federal judge dismissed the suit.

In the winter of 1962–63, local Black leaders formed the Dallas County Voters’ League. Two women—Marie P. Foster and Amelia Boynton—were among the league’s founders. When her husband died suddenly in 1963, Amelia Boynton took over the civil rights work he had pioneered. “A voteless people is a hopeless people,” she believed. She asked both SCLC and SNCC to help the Voters’ League’s efforts. SCLC decided against it because of their heavy investment in their Birmingham campaign, but SNCC was interested in the kind of long-term organizing effort the Voters’ League wanted.

In February 1963, Bernard and Colia Lafayette came to Selma in a 1948 Chevrolet someone had given SNCC. Lafayette, a native of Tampa, Florida, was twenty-two. He had been a participant in James Lawson’s 1959 nonviolence workshops in Nashville, active in the Nashville sit-ins, and a Freedom Rider who had served time in Parchman penitentiary. Preparing to go to Selma, he said, “The first struggle will be against Black fear, not against white resistance.”¹

Lafayette first met with the Black ministers’ organization. One minister told him Blacks in Selma had no problems: “We know how to get what we want from white people. You just have to know how to get it.”² He fell to his knees and held out his hand.

In contrast, Lafayette reported, the Voters’ League members were “stand-up people.” The Lafayettes and the Voters’ League spent the spring and summer trying to persuade potential voters to come to a registration school or to go to the courthouse to register to vote. Although their focus was on voter registration, the presence of the SNCC workers spurred Selma’s youth into militant action. Inspired by the promise of the 1964 Civil Rights Act desegregating public accommodations, five students were arrested in lunch counter sit-ins on September 15, and one hundred young people marched in protest on the courthouse. They were arrested and jailed.

Ten days later, SNCC chairman John Lewis and twenty-five others were arrested for picketing the county courthouse demanding the right to vote; they were sentenced to one hundred days in jail. Two days later, comedian Dick Gregory and his wife, Lillian, came to town; she was arrested. James Forman wrote in his autobiography about the trap they were building for Clark: “My first objective was to turn the demonstrations and the whole climate of protest into a thrust for the right to vote and against Jim Clark. . . . Our strategy was to force the US government to intervene if there were arrests. If they did not intervene, that inaction would once again prove that the government was not on our side and intensify the development of a mass consciousness among blacks.”³

On October 7, SNCC sponsored a “Freedom Day,” and over two hundred Blacks came to the courthouse to try to register to vote. SNCC workers who tried to feed or bring water to those waiting in line were arrested and beaten. Earlier that year, in July 1964, in response to Black desegregation protests, a circuit court judge, James Hare, issued an injunction that suspended the First Amendment in Dallas County, and civil rights activity was declared illegal. The momentum SNCC had created was being dissipated.

In November 1964, Mrs. Boynton spoke to an SCLC staff retreat in Birmingham. She told them SNCC had nearly run out of steam in Selma. The judge’s injunction had throttled all protest. But the division between city hall and the courthouse where Sheriff Clark ruled could be exploited to create a successful movement in Selma.

It was easy for SCLC to choose Selma. Voter registration was the main issue there; registration was an issue SCLC wanted to focus on, now that the Civil Rights Act had been passed. Two million more Blacks had voted in the 1964 election than had voted four years before; 94 percent had voted for the Democrats. President Johnson had carried every state except Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Fewer than 45 percent of eligible Blacks were registered in the Southern states Johnson lost. Black votes helped Johnson carry Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia. Clearly, effective registration drives would influence American politics. Already the 1964 election—in addition to electing Johnson president—had upset the old coalition between Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. Now the Democrats had convincing majorities in both houses of Congress. But by 1964’s election, only 335 Blacks were registered in Dallas County.

Sheriff Clark was another attraction. A clone of Birmingham’s Bull Connor, he could be counted on to provide the violence required to create national revulsion. SCLC’s director of affiliates, the Reverend C. T. Vivian, met with the Dallas County Voters’ League. Selma is a good spot, he reported. The only negative was SNCC’s presence. SCLC set January 2, 1965, as the date of a mass meeting in Selma to announce the beginning of its entry into the city, kick off its drive for the right to vote, and test Judge Hare’s injunction.⁴

In the meantime, as in Birmingham, a split in Selma’s white politics temporarily opened an opportunity for local Blacks to seek change. The powerful white political machine that had run Selma so successfully for so long was in decline, enabling the new, more moderate Selma government to try to distance itself from the racially radical government in the county. In 1963 and in 1964, Sheriff Clark had been responsible for most of the civil rights arrests in Selma, drawing unwelcome attention from the news media and the federal government, embarrassing the industry-seeking city government, exactly as civil rights forces had hoped.

Clark and Baker came to an agreement; the city police under Baker would handle all law enforcement in the city’s limits. Any offenses committed at the courthouse would be handled entirely by Sheriff Clark. By restricting Clark to the courthouse, Selma’s whites hoped to diminish his role in fueling the movement. In fact, the opposite happened. Clark’s role in the protests actually expanded. The civil rights community in Selma wanted to be arrested by Jim Clark at the courthouse, not by Wilson Baker on the way there. Under the new arrangement, Baker protected marchers until they arrived at the courthouse door, where Clark could unleash his ugliest behavior.

King kicked off the SCLC campaign at the January mass meeting. Even before the SCLC campaign began, Lyndon Johnson was considering new legislation to protect the right to vote.

GENESIS: THE 1965 VOTING RIGHTS ACT

As expected, the 1964 Democratic Convention at Atlantic City had nominated Lyndon Johnson and Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey for president and vice president. Winning the vice presidential spot, Johnson let it be known, depended on Hubert Humphrey’s ability to peacefully settle the challenge posed by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s delegation to the all-white Democratic regulars, who had kept Blacks from any participation in party activity.

The MFDP, while overwhelmingly Black, was open to all Mississippians. The white regular Mississippi Democrats opposed Johnson’s domestic programs, which the MFDP supported. The MFDP supported the Democratic Party and expected to support Johnson; many of the regular Mississippi Democrats supported the Republican, Barry Goldwater. Through SNCC’s contacts, the MFDP had lined up support from nine state delegations and twenty-five Democratic congressmen. Most important for the president, however, was avoiding any action that would alienate Southern whites. On August 22, 1964, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, the MFDP presented its case to the Credentials Committee; Fannie Lou Hamer was the most important witness. She was in the middle of a harrowing description of the beating she had received in Winona, Mississippi, when President Johnson hastily called a press conference, knocking Mrs. Hamer off national television.

The Johnson forces then offered a compromise: MFDP delegates could participate in the convention but would not be allowed to vote. When the MFDP rejected this resolution, Johnson’s forces turned up the pressure. Johnson had instructed the FBI to keep tabs on the MFDP, so they knew the delegates supporting the MFDP challenge and began to strong-arm them.⁵ Support for the MFDP began to erode. Another compromise was offered: the MFDP would be given two at-large seats that would be filled by MFDP members Aaron Henry and Edwin King. The Johnson administration specified the acceptable MFDP delegates, unwilling to let the MFDP choose who would fill the two seats; Johnson explicitly did not want Hamer. The other members of the delegation would be “guests” of the convention.

By August 25, Johnson had been successful in cutting away the MFDP’s support. The choice they now faced was two seats or none. Civil liberties lawyer Joe Rauh, Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and others urged the MFDP delegates to take the compromise; in the end, the delegates overwhelmingly rejected it. “We’ve been treated like beasts in Mississippi. . . . We risk our lives coming up here,” Annie Devine explained.⁶ “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Mrs. Hamer said, “because all of us is tired!”⁷

The MFDP’s defeat in Atlantic City at the hands of the Democratic Party’s perfidious liberals further widened the gulf between SNCC and the national liberal community. For the Democratic Party, the offer of two seats seemed a reasonable compromise; for the MFDP and SNCC, two seats filled by representatives chosen by others was an insult, a continuation of the tokenism and condescension with which whites had been treating Blacks for years. “Them people had not been even talking to us poor folks,” Unita Blackwell explained. “The big niggers talked to the big niggers . . . but the little folks told them no, they wasn’t going to take it and they meant business.”⁸ For many SNCC workers, the MFDP’s experience showed how weak white liberals and Black Democratic officeholders were, and how little they could be depended upon. Confronted by a reporter about the compromise, Moses angrily replied, “We are here for the people and the people want to represent themselves. They don’t want symbolic token votes.”⁹

What Blacks needed, many decided, was Black power, Black people electing and controlling their own representatives. SNCC had demonstrated its ability to organize and mobilize; but when it tried to win power, its allies fled. More and more, SNCC would look away from established politics and coalitions and toward creating Black power for Black people. As historian Steven Lawson observed, the MFDP served “as a prototype for the model of Black Power advocated and popularized by Stokely Carmichael.”¹⁰

The MFDP’s legal efforts against white resistance to political equality proved important to Black political efforts across the South. An MFDP-directed lawsuit resulted in the Supreme Court’s landmark 1969 decision in Allen v. [Virginia] State Board of Elections, which said that all changes to state voting rights laws were subject to review under the Voting Rights Act. The decision was “critical to continuing Black political progress throughout the South,” a scholar wrote. “For the first time, . . . the Supreme Court recognized and applied the principle of minority vote dilution—that the black vote can be affected as much by dilution as by an absolute prohibition on casting a ballot.”¹¹

The MFDP wasn’t the only organization SNCC helped build that survived the demise of the parent. In 1964, SNCC encouraged a group of New York progressive health professionals to form a group to provide health care to workers in the Freedom Summer campaign. Most were veterans of past attempts to organize physicians to push to integrate the American Medical Association’s segregated Southern affiliates and of sporadic attempts to win support for national health insurance. They called their new organization the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR). “Wherever there was a demonstration or confrontation,” historian John Dittmer writes, “be it at the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma or on the Meredith March in the South, in Resurrection City with the Poor People’s Campaign, at Columbia University during the student rebellion, in the streets of Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968 or at Wounded Knee with the American Indian Movement, men and women in white coats and Red Cross armbands were on the scene, providing ‘medical presence’ and assistance to the people who were putting themselves at risk.” Seeing US health care as racist, unjust, and inadequate, Dittmer writes, “MCHR members established free health clinics in inner cities and . . . campaigned for a national health service that would provide quality health care for everyone.”¹²

THE STRUGGLE FOR VOTING RIGHTS CONTINUES

Johnson was elected president on November 3, 1964. Blacks had voted nine to one for the Democrats. Black votes had been the victory margin for the Democrats in Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. The MFDP had supported Johnson, even as most of the regular Democratic Party in Mississippi was campaigning—and carrying the state—for Barry Goldwater. Johnson won with a staggering sixteen-million-vote margin, carrying forty-four states. Goldwater won six—his home state, Arizona, and Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. But the Goldwater coattails added five new Republican congressmen in Alabama and one each in Georgia and Mississippi, the first GOP House and Senate members from those states since Reconstruction. Everywhere in the South that Blacks could vote, Johnson won; everywhere Blacks could not vote, he lost.

On November 4, the day after his election, Johnson asked Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to draft “the next civil rights bill—legislation to secure, for once and for all, equal voting rights.”¹³ The voting rights provisions of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and even 1964 had been hamstrung with onerous judicial procedures; the federal government had to go case by case, county by county, through a judicial swamp where hostile local officials and hostile federal judges made each case several years’ work. As soon as one tortuous barrier to Black registration was beaten down after a long court battle, local officials erected another. Where provisions written in local law were not sufficient, terror and economic intimidation served to keep the number of registered Blacks low. The Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 had shown that hostile whites in Mississippi would spare no effort to block voter registration; Johnson knew something else was required if Blacks were ever to be able to vote.

Katzenbach turned to Harold Greene, a lawyer in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Greene developed three alternative ways of guaranteeing the right to vote for Blacks. Katzenbach presented them to Johnson. First was a constitutional amendment that would prevent all states from imposing any requirement on voters except on the basis of age, residency, criminal record, or psychiatric institutionalization. This would eliminate the state literacy tests that Blacks failed while illiterate whites passed, and state poll taxes, which kept Blacks from voting in state and local elections. This way would be slow; thirteen states could kill it—such an amendment requires ratification by three-fourths of the states, thirty-eight of fifty, and it would be vulnerable to attack as federal interference with states’ rights. The second option was the creation of a new federal commission with the power to appoint federal registrars for federal elections. This would leave state elections unaffected. Or finally, they could empower an existing agency to assume direct control of federal and state election registration in any area where the percentage of registered Blacks was low. This offered the quickest method and was therefore the one best able to take advantage of the national mood favorable to civil rights legislation brought about in part by Kennedy’s death.¹⁴

In Johnson’s State of the Union message on January 4, 1965, he promised legislation ending “every obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote,” but he set no timetable. Johnson’s eventual plan applied in those states where fewer than 50 percent of voters had registered or voted in the 1964 presidential election and that employed a literacy test—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and sections of North Carolina. It suspended literacy tests, authorized the attorney general to dispatch federal registrars and observers to resistant counties, and empowered the Justice Department to require affected states to preclear changes in election law. Martin Luther King had arrived in Selma to kick off SCLC’s campaign just two days before. Events there—and the personality of Jim Clark—would soon help the president and Congress see that the time was now!

SELMA, 1965

The Selma that King visited in January 1965 had been thoroughly prepared for increased movement activity by generations of Black activists and the patient work begun two years before by Bernard and Colia Lafayette. One measure of the Lafayettes’ success was a surge in Black militancy and a willingness to confront Selma’s white officialdom, which made King’s movement possible. Bernard Lafayette had patiently earned the trust of Selma’s Black community, following a pattern of walking, talking, and listening that had become SNCC’s hallmark organizing style. He and his wife had begun regular meetings with the Dallas County Voters’ League, conducted registration clinics, and established contacts among area activists in nearby counties.

In June 1963, a white man beat Lafayette; a few days later, Selma police arrested Lafayette for vagrancy. But he organized a series of mass meetings and invited speakers from outside Selma, including SCLC’s James Bevel and Ella Baker. The numbers attending these gatherings slowly grew larger. Before King’s arrival, Bevel had met in Selma with SNCC staffers and local Blacks to organize a coordinated campaign. No one wanted a repeat of the sniping that had characterized the Albany Movement in 1961 and 1962. Bevel announced that local Blacks would make all decisions.

In the middle of SCLC’s planning for the Selma campaign, J. Edgar Hoover stepped up his attacks on King. At an FBI briefing for women reporters, Hoover called King “the most notorious liar in the country”—later charging that SCLC was “spearheaded by Communists and moral degenerates.”¹⁵ This attack followed King’s criticism of FBI inaction in Albany two years before. It also came from Hoover’s access, via phone tapping, to King’s private life and his continuing relationship with Stanley Levison.

Hoover had circulated throughout the executive branch reports of King’s philandering. As King was preparing to go to Norway to accept the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, James Farmer told him he had heard three rumors about King: (1) King was guilty of financial misconduct; (2) he was the tool of Communists; and (3) he had participated in sexual orgies. If Farmer, a leader of the movement who was himself subjected to FBI suspicion and surveillance, had heard these charges, they were surely widespread within the Johnson administration. The FBI offered them to White House journalists and to church and labor leaders who might support King’s efforts in the South. Other friends of King had heard the rumors and warned him about his behavior. Some supporters argued that womanizing was the Black pastor’s prerogative, others that King simply reflected a prevailing male chauvinism. Bernard Lee said, “He believed that the wife should stay home and take care of the babies while he’d be out there in the streets.”¹⁶ Others argued that the entire movement was sexually promiscuous and that King’s behavior was no different from the behavior of many others—men and women. But King was the best-known person in the movement, expected to set a high standard of public and private behavior. The FBI knew its threats and leaks and rumors would have an effect on King and hoped they would also affect the movement he led.

Women in the movement like Ella Baker and Septima Clark, as well as his own wife, had been critical of King’s attitude toward women’s roles and leadership.¹⁷ Dorothy Cotton said after his death, “He would have had a lot to learn and a lot of growing to do” about women’s rights. She remembered she was “always asked to take notes . . . always asked to go fix Dr. King some coffee.” “I did it too,” she added, while recognizing the chauvinism in the movement. “They were sexist male preachers [who] grew up in a sexist culture. . . . I really loved Dr. King but I know that streak was in him also.”¹⁸

King and Hoover finally met on December 1, 1964; their meeting was nonproductive, with King withdrawing most of his criticism and Hoover defending the FBI’s efforts in the South. But even while they met, FBI agents were offering material on King’s sex life to newsmen waiting outside the FBI director’s office for King to appear. Two days after King appeared in Selma, Mrs. King opened a box that had arrived at the SCLC office a month before. It contained a reel of tape and a letter. The tape contained King’s voice and the voices of others, telling sexual jokes, and the sounds of people engaging in sex.

An unsigned letter mailed separately told King, “You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. . . . Clearly, you don’t believe in any personal moral principles. . . . The American public . . . will know you for what you are—an evil, abnormal beast.” The letter invited King to kill himself before the news of his moral degeneracy became public. “There is one thing left for you to do. You know what this is. . . . There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”¹⁹ King correctly guessed that the letter and tape came straight from J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. It had been ordered two days after Hoover attacked King in November. FBI assistant director William Sullivan wrote the letter and sent an FBI agent to Miami to mail it to help disguise its origins.²⁰

The January 2, 1965, mass meeting where King kicked off the Selma movement was a test of the movement’s ability to break Judge Hare’s 1964 injunction and a test of white Selma’s ability to deal with the movement. Selma’s whites had two choices: to follow Sheriff Jim Clark’s bluster or Wilson Baker’s quieter law enforcement. Clark would guarantee headlines and would invite international attention; Baker might be able to counter the movement and quietly squash it as Chief Laurie Pritchett had done in Albany in 1961 and 1962. The day before King arrived, Baker announced he would not arrest anyone for attending the meeting.

King’s mass meeting speech, delivered one hundred and two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, laid down the challenge: “Selma has become a symbol of bitter-end resistance to the civil rights movement. We will dramatize the situation to arouse the federal government by marching in the thousands to the place of registration. We are not asking, we are demanding the ballot.” If Selma didn’t respond, King said, “We will appeal to Governor Wallace. If he refuses to listen, we will appeal to the legislature. If they don’t listen, we will appeal to the conscience of the Congress in another dramatic march on Washington!”²¹

Demonstrations began anew in Selma on January 18, 1965. King and SNCC’s John Lewis led four hundred Blacks from Brown’s Chapel AME Church to the Dallas County Courthouse. Sheriff Clark made marchers—all of them potential voters—line up in an alley adjacent to the courthouse while they waited for one voter per hour to take the registration test. At discussions after the day’s events, SCLC staff members were disturbed and disappointed that Clark had behaved in such a mild manner toward the marchers. There had been no incident, no beating, and no occasion for the newsmen present to send a signal to the world that brutality had been directed against peaceful citizens who wanted the most basic right—the right to vote. They discussed taking their protests outside Selma, into Marion or Camden, if they didn’t get a better response from Sheriff Clark.

On January 19, the marchers decided they would not enter the courthouse alley; this was an SCLC strategy to provoke Clark, and, as if on cue, he responded. He grabbed Mrs. Boynton by the coat collar and roughly pushed her the length of a city block to a patrol car. Sixty of the marchers were arrested. Watching from the sidelines, King told newsmen, “That is one of the most brutal and unlawful acts I have ever seen an officer commit.”²² “Jim Clark,” an SCLC staff member said, “is another Bull Connor. We should put him on the staff.”²³

Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president the next day. As he celebrated his inauguration, three waves of marchers descended on the Dallas County Courthouse, and, when they refused to obey the sheriff’s orders to go to the alley, he arrested them; 226 were now in jail. On January 22, Frederick Reese, one of the founders of the Voters’ League and an unsuccessful candidate for the city council in the 1960 elections, led a march of more than one hundred Black teachers to the courthouse. That these ordinarily cautious public employees, the backbone of Selma’s Black middle class, were marching to the courthouse was proof that a new militancy had been awakened in Black Selma. If teachers were marching, anything could happen! This was a result of the Lafayettes’ patient work and a signal that Selma’s Blacks thought the differences between Baker and Clark were large enough to encourage actions they had not dared to take before.

For the first time, some small cracks began to appear in the solid front that Selma’s Blacks, SCLC, and SNCC had erected. Local Blacks in the Dallas County Voters’ League wanted primarily to win the right to vote for themselves. SNCC hoped to develop a Black political movement in Selma. SCLC saw Selma as the staging ground for a protest movement that would win the right to vote throughout the South. King had a quick, national agenda. SNCC had a long-term strategy. Selma Blacks had a local, limited plan.

Over the weekend after the teachers’ march, US federal judge Daniel Thomas issued a temporary restraining order barring Selma and Dallas County officials from hindering registration applicants, as they had since the drive began. But on Monday, January 25, Sheriff Clark was back on the job, harassing the demonstrators. After he pushed several of them, fifty-three-year-old Annie Lee Cooper gave the sheriff a powerful punch to the head. Three deputies jumped on her and wrestled her to the ground. As Clark stood over her with his billy club raised, she said, “I wish you would hit me, you scum!”²⁴ The sound his club made hitting her head could be heard across the street. A wire service picture of Mrs. Cooper on the ground with Clark standing over her was flashed around the world.

King went back to Atlanta for a dinner by city notables honoring him for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Hoover had tried to disrupt this dinner, offering Atlanta Constitution editor Eugene Patterson and the Catholic archbishop information about King’s sex life. Both men had refused and remained sponsors of the dinner.

The SCLC staff decided that King had to go to jail to further focus attention on Selma, and on February 1, he led 260 marchers to the courthouse, where all were arrested. Later that day, another 700 were arrested, and 600 marched to the courthouse in nearby Perry County. King and Ralph Abernathy shared a cell with white SCLC staff member Charles Fager. King and Fager talked about how difficult it would be—regardless of the success they were sure to have in Selma—to win true freedom for America’s Blacks. King said to Fager: “If we are going to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”²⁵ King wrote a “Letter from the Selma Jail” intended to echo his Birmingham jail letter. Appearing as a full-page ad in the New York Times, it said, “THERE ARE MORE NEGROES IN JAIL WITH ME THAN THERE ARE ON THE VOTING ROLLS.”²⁶

Judge Thomas issued another order on February 4, telling the Dallas County registrars to stop using Alabama’s difficult registration test, to stop rejecting applicants for minor errors, to make monthly reports to the judge, and to process one hundred applicants each day. That same day, Lyndon Johnson issued a statement saying: “All Americans should be indignant when one American is denied the right to vote. The loss of that right to a single citizen undermines the freedom of every citizen. . . . I intend to see that that right is secured for all our citizens!”²⁷

Malcolm X came to Selma that day too. He had been invited to speak at nearby Tuskegee Institute, and SNCC workers asked him to come to Selma. Speaking at Brown’s Chapel, he said Blacks should stress the international nature of their struggle by taking their case to the United Nations and should use “any means necessary” to get the vote. Later, in a private meeting with Coretta Scott King, he told her, “If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”²⁸

More were arrested in Selma and in Perry County. On Friday, February 5, King left the Dallas County jail. The next day, in the first official announcement that new legislation was in the offing, presidential press secretary George Reedy told newsmen that LBJ would make “a strong recommendation” to Congress on voting rights in the near future.²⁹ King flew to Washington on February 9 where he met with Vice President Humphrey and President Johnson. On February 10, Sheriff Clark and his mounted posse used cattle prods to drive 165 protesters into the country on a forced march at top speed.

That night’s mass meeting overflowed two churches. It would take months for Johnson’s voting rights bill to go through Congress; how could SCLC keep the pressure on? Selma’s Black population could not sustain many more months of demonstrations, beatings, and jail. They would have to take the movement elsewhere, but first they needed to win some sort of victory for the people of Selma. Nearby Lowndes County might be better for winning a victory than Selma, some SCLC staffers thought. It lay in the federal judicial district presided over by liberal federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. Judge Johnson was sure to give the movement rulings better than those handed down by Judge Thomas.

Tension among SCLC, SNCC, and local Blacks continued. SNCC workers objected, as did local Blacks, to the SCLC staff’s high-handed ways. They made and announced decisions without consultation. On February 13, local whites met with representatives of the Community Relations Service and the Dallas County Voters’ League; the whites agreed to ease registration requirements. It was becoming clear that Selma’s Blacks would agree to a truce in Selma’s racial war if local registration requirements were eased. What SCLC wanted, however, wasn’t just the right to vote in Selma; they wanted it guaranteed by federal law everywhere. If Selma’s whites accommodated local Black demands, and local Blacks agreed, SCLC would have to move elsewhere to keep the pressure on for national relief.

As part of that strategy, King led a march in Selma on February 15; he then watched a march in Camden, in Wilcox County, and then spoke in Marion, in Perry County. On February 16, King told a reporter, “We are considering the possibility of a large group from throughout the state going to Montgomery,” and he told a mass meeting crowd that the time had come for nighttime marches.³⁰ SCLC had used nighttime marches in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. They had succeeded in bringing out the most lawless elements among white supremacists, producing spectacular, violent clashes, and unplanned retaliation from some Blacks. Nighttime marches in Alabama might well produce the same result.

On February 18, C. T. Vivian led a nighttime march toward the Perry County Courthouse. State troopers stopped the marchers a block from the church where they had begun and ordered them to turn around. Suddenly the streetlights went out, and the troopers and other lawmen began attacking the crowd with their clubs. In a cafe a block away, a trooper mortally wounded a young Black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was trying to protect his mother from the officers’ beating.

IN THE MIDST of the Selma movement, on February 21, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, Malcolm X was assassinated. One of the ironies of his life was that he never practiced the violence his earlier rhetoric had threatened. He criticized the Southern movement but never offered an alternative. He criticized the movement’s passivity but never actively opposed segregation himself. King, on the other hand, preached nonviolence but courted violence to advance the cause of civil rights. King and Malcolm X met only once—almost a year before in Washington when King had been there to lobby for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill—and had spoken for less than a minute.

Malcolm X had broken with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam and was searching to find a place for himself in the Black movement that had escalated from the South to every part of the nation so quickly. The Muslims—and Malcolm X—had stood apart from this movement, approaching it only as critics, warning that its tactics were wrong, unmanly, and that its reliance on white allies could only end in betrayal. Muslims were forbidden to even register to vote.

After breaking with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X had begun to support some of the orthodox civil rights strategies he had previously condemned. “The campaign that they have in Mississippi for voter registration is a good campaign,” he said at the second rally of the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU). “If our people down there are risking their lives so that they can register . . . what do you and I look like in New York City, with the registration booth only a few blocks away, and we haven’t been in it? . . . It’s a sin for you and me not to be registered so we can vote in New York City and in New York State, or throughout the North.”³¹

In December 1964, Malcolm spoke at a Harlem rally for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, appearing with Fannie Lou Hamer. He invited her to speak to an OAAU rally the next day. “Since I’ve gotten involved,” he said, “I am surprised at how militant some of these integrationists are sounding. Man, sometimes they put me to shame.” He also criticized the Nation of Islam. It “took no part in nothing that black people in this country were doing,” he said, “to correct conditions in our community, other than it had moral force—that it stopped our people from getting drunk and taking drugs and things of that sort. Which is not enough—after you sober up, you’re still poor.”³²

The Nation of Islam was fiercely reactionary, never challenging the nation’s racial status quo, its members forbidden from registering and voting and from participation in civil life. Elijah Muhammad believed Africa and Africans to be uncivilized, embraced American capitalism without question or criticism, and flirted with fascist and white racist groups. Even as the Nation cursed white people as “devils,” they were not beyond dealing with that same demon. But following the demise of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, no other group had promoted combining economic self-help, cultural redefinition, and moral living more vigorously than the Nation of Islam.

Malcolm X increasingly realized that not playing a direct role in the battle for Black rights was really taking sides against the civil rights movement; the militant rhetoric of the Nation of Islam concealed its essential conservatism. After his break with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, in part through founding the Organization of Afro-American Unity, began trying to build bridges between Black Nationalists and the civil rights movement he had scorned.

After his death, the movement he had tried to build degenerated into posturing and revolutionary bombast, romanticizing revolutionary violence. Unlike the nonviolent civil rights movement that it held in contempt, Nation of Islam leaders created no mass movement, made no sustained institutional challenge, and, through the fantasy of separatism, isolated themselves away from building political strength. Their greatest effect was intellectual and cultural, not political.

FIVE DAYS AFTER Malcolm X was assassinated, Jimmie Lee Jackson died. On March 3, King returned to Marion to preach at Jackson’s funeral. Two days later, King was back in Washington to meet with President Johnson. The president told King that he had managed to win the crucial support of Senator Everett Dirksen for the voting rights bill. Back in Selma, James Bevel announced that the planned drive to Montgomery had been converted to a march in Jimmie Lee Jackson’s memory; it would begin on March 7.

While King was away, Alabama governor George Wallace was trying to decide how to deal with the planned march. Wallace reasoned that the marchers would not be prepared to go the fifty-four miles to the state capitol; if his officers let the marchers proceed, they would soon have to turn back, making them “the laughing stock of the nation.”³³ State troopers were told to let it proceed. But the state representative from Lowndes County warned Wallace that his constituents would meet the marchers with guns and explosives; to protect the marchers and to protect Alabama from the unfavorable publicity of more attacks on nonviolent protesters, the marchers would have to be stopped. Wallace sent word to Al Lingo, the commander of the state troopers, to stop the marchers. Selma’s mayor, Smitherman, was told the troopers wouldn’t use violence as they had in Marion.

Within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the march was both supported and opposed. SNCC chairman John Lewis, also an SCLC board member, argued that local people supported it and they should therefore continue to provide assistance.³⁴ Other SNCC workers argued that SCLC’s dependence on marches and showy tactics killed local leadership. Finally it was decided that SNCC workers could march.

On Sunday, March 7, six hundred people gathered for the march. With King in Atlanta, SCLC’s Hosea Williams telephoned Abernathy—who was also in Atlanta—to ask for directions, and, after consulting with King, Abernathy gave the go-ahead. A coin toss gave Williams the right to lead the march, and the six hundred filed out of the Brown Chapel Church.³⁵ Selma public safety director, Wilson Baker, was certain the march would end in bloodshed and declared—under threat of resignation—that his men would not take part in it. He was encouraged that Sheriff Clark was out of town, and Alabama state patrol commander Al Lingo would be in Montgomery.

When Lewis and Williams reached the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they could see state troopers waiting three hundred yards ahead. Flanking both sides of the road were members of Clark’s armed and mounted posse. The marchers pulled to fifty feet of the line of troopers and were met by troop commander Major John Cloud. “This is an unlawful assembly,” Cloud bellowed through a bullhorn. “Your march is not conducive to public safety. You are ordered to disperse and to go back to your church and your homes.” Williams and Lewis asked if they could have a word with him. “There is no word to be had,” Cloud replied. They repeated this exchange twice. Then Cloud announced: “You have two minutes to turn around and go back to your church.” A moment later, Cloud gave the order: “Troopers, advance.”

One witness reported:

The troopers rushed forward, their blue uniforms and white helmets blurring into a flying wedge as they moved. The wedge moved with such force that it seemed to pass over the waiting column instead of through it. The first 10 or 20 Negroes were swept to the ground screaming, arms and legs flying, and packs and bags went skittering across the grassy divider strip onto the pavement on both sides. Those still on their feet retreated. The troopers continued pushing, using both the force of their bodies and the prodding of their nightsticks. A cheer went up from the white spectators lining the south side of the highway. The mounted possemen spurred their horses and rode at a run into the retreating mass. The Negroes cried out as they crowded together for protection, and the whites on the sidelines whooped and cheered. The Negroes paused in their retreat for perhaps a minute, still screaming and huddling together. Suddenly there was a report like gunshot and a grey cloud spewed over the troopers and the Negroes. “Tear gas!” someone yelled.³⁶

Protected by gas masks, the troopers continued their attack. John Lewis went down. Mrs. Boynton was knocked unconscious. Mounted policemen chased the marchers as they ran back across the bridge. Eighty people were treated for injuries; seventeen were admitted to the local hospital.

Across the country, many television viewers were watching the ABC-TV movie of the week, Judgment at Nuremberg, about the Nazi war crimes trials. When the movie was interrupted to show what had happened on the bridge in Selma, many thought they were still looking at the movie, seeing scenes of Nazi terror. Many felt drawn by the violence to Selma. One was a Harvard law student named Bruce Babbitt, who caught the first plane he could and stayed in Selma for a week.³⁷

A hasty conference call between King and others concluded with a decision to send out the word for a national convergence on Selma and to coordinate an avalanche of telegrams and calls to the White House and Congress pressing for the voting rights legislation. A second attempt at the march was set for Tuesday, March 9, but King let it be known that meaningful federal intervention could cancel it. Movement lawyers—led by Fred Gray—asked federal judge Frank Johnson to issue an order demanding protection for future marchers. Instead Johnson ordered the planned march postponed until he could hold a hearing on March 11.

Again King was faced with the dilemma of violating an injunction from a federal judge. Hosea Williams and SNCC’s Forman argued that the march should go on, no matter what Judge Johnson or President Johnson did. King told a mass meeting that the planned March 9 march would go on. In the meantime, SCLC’s lawyers told Judge Johnson that King would not march; John Doar met with King late that night to try to persuade him to call the march off. President Johnson woke up former Florida governor Leroy Collins, now head of the Community Relations Service, and sent him to Selma to try to stop King and the marchers. Collins persuaded King to make a symbolic march from the church to the spot where the troopers had begun their attack on March 7. There they would stop and return to the church. If Collins could get Clark and Lingo to agree, King said he would do it.

Collins got Clark and Lingo to agree, and on March 9, King took two thousand marchers out of the Brown Chapel Church—including some of the hundreds of outsiders who had begun to stream into Selma—back through the route that had led to bloody Sunday two days before. On the Selma side of the bridge, a US marshal read Judge Johnson’s order to King, forbidding the march. King listened—and then led the column forward. Fifty feet from the troopers, King halted, and a brief prayer service was held. Then King turned and began walking back across the bridge toward Selma. As he did, the line of troopers blocking the road parted, leaving the path to Montgomery open and clear.

Obviously, Governor Wallace had ordered the troopers to clear the road, hoping to embarrass King just as he turned away. Back at the church, King faced other criticism, from SNCC and even from those who had been drawn to Selma following the terrible beating on Sunday night. The mood before the march had been optimistic, even cheerful; the movement was on the move. Now they had been turned back, not by beatings but through some secret agreement known only to King and a few leaders.

Despite the disappointments in Selma, sympathy was building across the country. Marches were held in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, and other cities; six hundred picketers surrounded the White House demanding federal action.

That evening, on March 9, a gang of whites attacked a group of three white ministers from Massachusetts in downtown Selma; one of them, the Reverend James Reeb, was severely injured. The next day, Wednesday, anger at King—especially from SNCC—was mounting. SNCC’s Forman announced that the organization would shift its operations to Montgomery, and protests at the Alabama State Capitol were organized with students from Tuskegee Institute. Judge Johnson held hearings on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. On Thursday evening, James Reeb died of his injuries. His death generated much more protest than Jimmie Lee Jackson’s. White clergymen from around the country were activated, and President Johnson and Vice President Humphrey called his widow.

On Sunday, Wallace flew to Washington to meet with President Johnson. King was the problem in Alabama, Wallace said, not the denial of the right to vote. He had hoped to reason with the president, just as Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had when he had flown to Newport in 1957 to meet with President Eisenhower over the Little Rock school integration crisis. But unlike Eisenhower, Johnson would not be taken in by another crafty Southern politician.

President Johnson reminded Wallace of his populist beginnings and said: “You came into office a liberal—you spent all your life trying to do things for the poor. Now, why are you working on this? Why are you off on this Negro thing? . . . What do you want left after you, when you die? Do you want a great big marble monument that reads “George Wallace—He Built.” Or do you want a little piece of pine board lying across that harsh caliche soil that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Hated.’“³⁸

With one thousand protesters marching around the White House, Johnson told Wallace that he, Wallace, was wrong and later told a press conference:

What happened in Selma was an American tragedy. The blows that were received, the blood that was shed, the life of the good man that was lost, must strengthen the determination of each of us to bring full and equal and exact justice to all of our people. This is not just the policy of your government or your President. It is in the heart and the purpose and the meaning of America itself. We all know how complex and how difficult it is to bring about basic social change in a democracy, but this complexity must not obscure the clear and simple moral issues. It is wrong to do violence to peaceful citizens in the streets of their town. It is wrong to deny Americans the right to vote. It is wrong to deny any person full equality because of the color of his skin.³⁹

On Monday night, after King had spoken in Selma at a memorial service for James Reeb on the Dallas County Courthouse steps, Johnson spoke to Congress. He repeated much of what he had said at the White House on Sunday; he spoke of Selma. It was, he said, like Lexington, and Concord, and Appomattox, where “history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” And he closed his speech with the movement’s slogan, “We Shall Overcome!”⁴⁰

In a living room in Black Selma, Martin Luther King cried.

On Wednesday, Judge Johnson handed down a decision. In this case, he said, “The wrongs are enormous. The extent of the right to demonstrate against these wrongs should be determined accordingly.”⁴¹ He approved a proposal made by SCLC lawyers to allow three hundred marchers to use sections of Highway 80 from Selma to Montgomery and enjoined Alabama authorities from failing to assist them. The federal government, Judge Johnson said, would provide whatever assistance Alabama needed. SCLC announced the march would begin on March 21.

On March 17, President Johnson’s voting rights legislation was unveiled. It would empower the attorney general to suspend literacy tests and appoint federal registrars in any state or county where fewer than 50 percent of the voting age population was registered or cast ballots for president on November 1, 1964. It would cover Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina but not Texas, Florida, or Tennessee.

Frank Soracco, a former SNCC staff member who had joined SCLC’s staff, was given the task of choosing three hundred marchers; he picked local people who had been to jail or been beaten and thirty-six outsiders. Once again, SCLC’s Hosea Williams was in charge. Nineteen hundred Alabama National Guardsmen, two thousand army personnel, and US marshals accompanied and protected the marchers.

Approved by a federal court, escorted by federalized troops, protected by federal marshals and FBI agents—the Selma-to-Montgomery march enjoyed federal co-sponsorship as had no civil rights effort in the past. It would be the final defeat of the diehard, segregationist South.

As the marchers passed through Lowndes County, Stokely Carmichael established contacts he would later use to create the Lowndes County Freedom Party—or, as it was popularly known, the Black Panther Party. It would become—over time—a potent political force in that majority-Black county.

At the march’s climax in Montgomery on March 25, twenty-five thousand people heard King, Rosa Parks, and others speak. King stood on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, a few feet from the gold star that marks the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy. “We are on the move now,” he said, “and no wave of racism can stop us.”⁴²

A hundred-plus yards before him he could see the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where his civil rights leadership had begun ten years earlier. It had taken King and the movement ten years to travel those hundred yards—a longer period than movement supporters had wished for, but a shorter period than most had dreamed. Governor Wallace watched the proceedings from inside the capitol.

Later that night, Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit, was shot and killed as she ferried marchers from Montgomery back to Selma. Liuzzo had answered the call after “Bloody Sunday” for volunteers to come down to Selma to support the movement. Four suspects were arrested the next day—one of them was FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, who had warned the FBI that Freedom Rider beatings would occur in Montgomery in 1961 and had then taken part in them.

THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson on August 6, 1965. Five days later, federal examiners began registering voters in Dallas, Hale, Marengo, and Lowndes Counties in Alabama; Leflore and Madison Counties in Mississippi; and East Carroll, East Feliciana, and Plaquemine Parishes in Louisiana. In one day, 1,144 Blacks had registered; overcrowding forced many to be turned away. The next day, 1,733 more were registered.

The right to vote, once restricted to white male property owners, had technically been extended to all men twenty-one and older by the Fourteenth Amendment, supposedly to African Americans by the Fifteenth Amendment, to women by the Nineteenth Amendment, to persons too poor to pay poll taxes by the Twenty-Fourth, and to everyone eighteen or older by the Twenty-Sixth.

The 1957 Civil Rights Act had been the first instance of modern federal interest in Southern Black voters. It created the Civil Rights Commission and a new Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice and gave the attorney general authority to file suits against officials and private citizens who hindered registration. But its remedies were judicial, time-consuming, and expensive. By contrast, the Voting Rights Act became effective almost immediately.

Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the attorney general’s certification became the unchallengeable basis for bringing states and political subdivisions under the act’s provisions and for the appointment of federal registrars and observers to monitor elections. In addition, covered states and covered local governmental units could not change any voting procedure or standard unless the attorney general or the US district court for the District of Columbia precleared the change as not having the purpose or effect of racial discrimination.

The Voting Rights Act has been successfully amended several times to prohibit “tests or devices” that had been used to disenfranchise racial minorities—literacy tests, education requirements, character tests, racial gerrymandering, and English-only elections in some districts; require that a covered jurisdiction seek and gain federal permission for any changes in election law or procedures to assure such changes do not abridge the right to vote based on race, color, or language minority status; and make clear that if the effect of a practice is discrimination, regardless of the intent, it is unlawful.

MORE BLACKS REGISTERED in Selma the week after the Voting Rights Act became law than in all the years of the twentieth century. A year later, Black registration doubled in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. By 1970, as many Blacks had registered in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, and North and South Carolina as had registered in the previous hundred years. If the civil rights movement from Montgomery in 1955 to Selma in 1965 made Southern Blacks visible, the Voting Rights Act turned visibility into influence. One result was the election of first-time Black officeholders—to Congress from Georgia and Texas in 1972, as Atlanta’s mayor in 1973, and as Virginia’s governor in 1989; and the renaissance in the early 1970s of white progressives—Arkansas’s Dale Bumpers, Florida’s Reuben Askew, Georgia’s Jimmy Carter, and Virginia’s Linwood Holton—represented a new, nonracist populism. Alabama’s George Wallace crowned a Black homecoming queen—and kissed her; Bull Connor tried to win Black votes by singing “We Shall Overcome”—he lost.

The increase in Black officeholders did not come from changing attitudes or voluntary reforms; it was the product of federal obligations forced on recalcitrant jurisdictions. Without the race-conscious requirements of the Voting Rights Act, Black and Hispanic office holding in the South would be nearly nonexistent. In the voting booth, racially polarized voting by whites remains pervasive. In early July 2006, the US House of Representatives voted 390 to 33 and the Senate 98 to 0 to renew portions of the act. President George W. Bush signed it into law.

Then, in 2013, the US Supreme Court, in a catastrophic 5–4 decision in Shelby County Alabama v. Holder, struck down the portion of the Voting Rights Act specifying which municipalities and states would be subject to preclearance, saying that formula was “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day” and thus unconstitutional. As these crucial protections were dismantled, voter suppression efforts surged.