THE LAST NIGHT IN CAMP TURNED OUT TO BE A FRIGHTENing and chaotic affair. To George, it felt at times more like a street riot waiting to happen than a high-minded crusade for the vindication of human rights.
March organizers had scheduled a show—a rally called “Stars for Freedom”—featuring a cavalcade of Hollywood headliners. So people came, both from Montgomery itself and from the surrounding countryside, and soon, the encampment grew packed, jammed with people. Worse, a mobile generator failed, leaving the field completely dark but for a disinterested half-moon parked in the sky above, flashlight beams probing the blackness, and the headlamps of passing vehicles carving the mass of people—some thirty thousand of them by this point—into long, weird shadows on the ground.
For hours, they milled about, growing increasingly agitated, even as march marshals pleaded for patience and calm. But things kept getting worse. A brief but fierce storm blew in out of nowhere, breaking two poles and nearly collapsing the field tent they were supporting. People began to pass out from heat and exhaustion, forcing stretcher bearers to push and plead their way through the crowd to carry the stricken to the camp hospital. There was some shoving and pushing and a few people found themselves jammed up against the stage, which was actually a platform built atop stacks of coffin crates loaned by a local Negro funeral home. Shelley Winters, the actress, administered first aid to some stricken girls who wound up laid out on the stage because there was no other place to put them.
Meanwhile, children, neither knowing nor caring one bit about heat exhaustion, voting rights, or Shelley Winters, were having the time of their lives. Freed for a night from the tyranny of bedtime, they climbed into the trees ringing the vast lawn, spun the merry-go-round in the playground and came off reeling with dizziness and shrieking with laughter, played jacks and jumped rope in golden squares of light cast by the hospital’s windows.
And like everyone else, they waited as the hours dragged themselves by, and the crowd’s mood of surly impatience only deepened. They had been promised a show, a grand closing-night performance by some of the many celebrities who had descended upon the march to bestow Hollywood’s benediction. But there could be no show where there was no power, and as the darkness showed no sign of abating, some resolved to remedy that on their own.
They clambered onto the stage and there, danced with abandon to tinny music from the speakers of a transistor radio. Soon, marshals were pleading with the interlopers to clear the stage. None of them—they all seemed to be teenagers—paid any heed.
“Bet’cha old Sheriff Clark and them Alabama state troopers could clear them young’uns off that stage in no time flat,” cracked a man who paused near George. They stood at the edge of the playground, where George had fled to escape the pushing and shoving. He could barely see the stranger in the darkness, couldn’t even tell if he was Negro or white.
“I’m sure he could,” he said. He kept his voice neutral, unsure if the man’s comment was a wry joke or a serious suggestion from some local white man who had infiltrated the camp.
Then, to George’s relief, to everyone’s relief, the lights came on. He checked his watch. It was midnight.
Things progressed quickly from there. The teenagers were dispossessed of the stage, the marshals managed to cut an aisle through the crowd for the entertainers to reach the platform, and the show finally went on. Dozens of singers, actors, and dignitaries trooped forward to offer brief songs or skits or just words of encouragement. Peter, Paul and Mary performed “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Coretta Scott King read a poem by Langston Hughes. Harry Belafonte sang one of his calypso numbers, “Jamaica Farewell.” The conductor Leonard Bernstein had no performance planned. “I just wanted to come down to be with you,” he told the crowd. Mike Nichols and Elaine May briefly resurrected their old comedy team with a sketch mocking Governor George Wallace. Sammy Davis, Jr. performed, as did Nipsey Russell. And author James Baldwin beamed. “This great march,” he intoned in his precise and manicured baritone, “is the beginning of the end of Negro enslavement.”
The crowd went wild at that. Why not? thought George. In that shining moment, it did not seem at all an outlandish thing to believe.
Six hours later, on barely five hours sleep, George stood in line waiting for a serving of trash-can oatmeal as, all around him, the march stirred itself to life one last time, four thousand people stretching and yawning and scratching and going in search of sustenance or to perform their morning ablutions. Some warmed themselves at makeshift firepits. Some read from pocket New Testaments. Some talked quietly in groups of two or three as they sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups.
George felt anticipation fluttering in his chest, like a butterfly in a cage. It was going to be a good day. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did.
The last segment of the march began almost at noon—two hours later than scheduled—following a debate over protocol. The marshals’ original plan, to give orange vests and a place of honor up front with Dr. King to those who had walked all fifty-four miles, was challenged by a handful of self-important dignitaries who, having parachuted in for the final leg of the journey, now wanted to claim the honor for themselves.
“No, that simply will not do,” one of them complained as the last of the coveted orange vests was handed out to a Negro teenager in denim coveralls. “Dr. Jonas was explicitly promised that he would walk arm in arm with Dr. King.”
Another cried, “Our president told us Dr. King wanted us to march with him.”
The marshal began pleading. “Gentlemen,” he said, “please be reasonable.”
It was too much for one of the young men in the orange vests. “All you dignitaries got to get in line behind me,” he ordered. “I sure didn’t see any of you fellows in Selma and I didn’t see you on the way to Montgomery. Ain’t nobody going to get in front of me but Dr. King himself.”
The older man drew himself up as if profoundly offended and turned on the marshals, not deigning to even acknowledge the teenager who had just called him out. “You expect me to march behind kids?” he complained.
But the young man did not back down. “These kids have marched all the way from Selma, sir. What have you done?”
“Look at his shoes,” someone else cried. “Ain’t a speck of mud on them shoes. I tell you what he’s done. He done sat somewhere comfortable and clean while we out here walkin’ through the swamps. You better line up in the back, Jack.”
“Make way for the originals!” someone called out.
It became the young people’s chant.
“Make way for the originals,” they cried. “Make way for the originals!”
George, who was down in the middle of the scrum with Lester and Reverend Porter, didn’t know what to do. But thankfully, Reverend Porter did and he raised a hand to plead for quiet. It took a moment for the chants to die down. Then he said, “All those of you trying to bully these young people ought to be ashamed of yourselves. These are the veterans of the Selma struggle. We are here to support them, not supplant them.”
As the orange vests applauded and nodded, Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, said, “That’s exactly right. You young people deserve to go first. I, for one, will be honored to march behind you.”
This brought more applause and shouts of approval. The tension seemed to leak out of the confrontation like air from a balloon.
But peace and order were short-lived. When King finally appeared, ready to lead the march, the dignitaries surged toward him like iron filings to a magnet, pushing for position. He was like a planet unto himself, exerting gravitational force. The scrum of people trying to get close was so unruly that George saw an older Negro woman in glasses shoved out of the crowd. She stumbled to the sidewalk, where she stood looking forlorn. It was Rosa Parks.
After still more long minutes of delay, order was restored. It was decided that the orange vests would precede Dr. King as a kind of vanguard. He would march accompanied by assorted aides, by Wilkins and UN under-secretary-general Dr. Ralph Bunche, by his wife, Coretta, and by Cager Lee, the eighty-two-year-old grandfather of Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose murder by an Alabama state trooper had ignited the whole crusade.
And finally, it was time.
Helicopters rumbled across the sky overhead. Support vehicles started their engines. Banners and flags were raised high. Photographers squinted through their viewfinders. Someone up ahead said, “Let’s go.” George muttered a brief prayer. “God be with us,” he said.
And the line began to move.