WHEN BERNARD LAFAYETTE DEPARTED SELMA IN AUGUST 1963, HE LEFT behind a group of impatient teenagers eager to carry on the struggle against racial injustice. They had become charged with the same restless energy that had inspired Lafayette himself to join SNCC and had provoked their elders in Selma—men and women like C. J. Adams, J. L. Chestnut Jr., and Amelia Boynton—to stand up against the forces of segregation in their own community. They eagerly awaited their next adventure, which came in the aftermath of the most tragic event in the history of the civil rights movement.
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, Charles Bonner and Cleophas Hobbs, Lafayette’s recruits, learned that Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church had been bombed. Killed instantly were three fourteen-year-old girls, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins, along with a fourth, Denise McNair, who, at eleven, was the youngest of the victims. The children had been dressing for the Sunday service. Addie Mae’s sister, thirteen-year-old Sarah who was blinded and bleeding from the twenty-one pieces of glass in her face, eyes, chest, and legs, somehow managed to find her way out of the wreckage. The doctors saved her life but had to remove her right eye. Sixteen others—parishioners and people just walking past the church—were injured. “In church! My, God, we’re not even safe in church,” said one anguished woman.1
An angry crowd quickly gathered outside the damaged building. They threw rocks and pieces of glass at the police and sheriff’s deputies who had responded to the bombing. The police and deputies, facing the unruly group, fired shotguns over the people’s heads, forcing them into nearby streets and alleys. Miraculously, no widespread rioting occurred, but senseless violence did claim two other lives that day. Birmingham police shot a black teenager in the back, claiming that he ran after throwing rocks at them. In a Birmingham suburb a sixteen-year-old Eagle Scout shot at two black boys on a bike, killing one, Virgil Ware. In all, the bombing and its aftermath caused six fatalities, none older than sixteen.2
The bombing was the work of Klansmen seeking revenge for Martin Luther King Jr.’s recent campaign in Birmingham. In the spring of 1963 King had launched “Project C—for Confrontation,” aimed at the city’s businesses. King’s hope was that boycotts, sit-ins, and marches would cripple Birmingham’s economic life and force the city’s merchants to allow blacks to patronize their stores. His strategy had worked brilliantly, much to the chagrin of the city’s many segregationists.
Although terrorist groups like the Klan would later retaliate against King, his chief enemy at first was Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor. King hoped that Connor, a fiery racist, would give in to his worst instincts and commit a public atrocity that would capture the nation’s attention—and he did. Under Connor’s direction, the city police roughly arrested demonstrators, and the jails were soon filled to capacity. Running out of troops, King accepted a plan from his aide Jim Bevel to turn to the city’s high school and even grammar school students for help, just as Bernard Lafayette was then doing in Selma.
The students had responded with enthusiasm, and their efforts fanned the flames just as King intended. On May 3, as more than a thousand young protestors poured out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which had become the movement’s second home, Connor let loose his police. They beat black youths with their nightsticks and allowed their vicious attack dogs to leap and bite the demonstrators, tearing their clothes and flesh. Then came the city’s fire hoses that, when turned on, swept people away under streams of pressurized water. The protestors rolled and tumbled like rag dolls; among them was Colia Lafayette, whose injuries would incapacitate her for several months. After the assaults came more arrests. By the end of the day over nine hundred children were in jail.
Television brought these images into American homes, sickening many people far removed from the atrocities. Among them was President John F. Kennedy, who determined to rein in the violence in Birmingham before it spiraled out of control. On his orders, Justice Department officials flew to Birmingham to meet with local businessmen, and on May 10 they reached a settlement. The merchants, whose businesses were badly hurt by the boycott, agreed to desegregate drinking fountains, restrooms, lunch counters, and dressing rooms within the next ninety days. They also promised to employ blacks in jobs that served the public; within sixty days a black clerk could help a black patron.
The Justice Department’s efforts in Birmingham were just part of a broader federal intervention in the South. On June 11 two qualified black students—James Hood and Vivian Malone—were admitted to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa over the protests of Governor George C. Wallace, who literally stood in the schoolhouse door. President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard, and Wallace stepped away. That same night the president also announced that he would soon send Congress a strong civil rights bill designed to give blacks access to public accommodations, from restaurants and hotels to theaters, parks, and swimming pools. Segregation in public spaces was the most visible manifestation of racial inequality in the United States, and under his administration, Kennedy hoped to end it. In a televised address to the nation Kennedy called civil rights a “moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures . . . and as clear as the American Constitution.” America “for all its hopes and all its boasts,” the president concluded, “will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”3
The summer of 1963 had ended with an event that echoed and amplified President Kennedy’s promise for racial justice. On August 28 a massive civil rights rally was held in the nation’s capital. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had originally been planned during World War II, but its architect, the legendary civil rights leader and labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, had agreed to call off the march in exchange for President Roosevelt’s promise to end discriminatory hiring practices in defense-related industries. In 1963, however, the march finally became a reality. Organized by leaders from CORE, SNCC, SCLC, NAACP, and the National Urban League, it was scheduled for the one hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The march was a historic event in and of itself, composed of some two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand people, both white and black, who gathered on the Washington Mall to hear songs by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary as well as speeches by the assembled civil rights luminaries. Its crescendo was without a doubt Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which—together with the remarkable turnout and favorable response throughout much of the nation—seemed to represent a stunning groundswell of support for the men and women fighting for their rights on the ground in the Deep South.
King’s was not the only address heard that day. John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette’s old friend from the Nashville movement and the Freedom Rides, who was representing SNCC, wanted to send a message to President Kennedy: “that,” as he later wrote, “the President was being too cautious, doing far too little when it came to meeting the needs of black Americans.” Among his complaints was a voting rights section of Kennedy’s proposed Civil Rights Bill requiring that black applicants show evidence of having had a sixth-grade education before being permitted to register. Lewis and his colleagues were furious. Southern states had prevented them from receiving an education equal to that of whites, and now they were being “punished” for that denial at the ballot box. Randolph and other leaders of the march forced Lewis to revise his remarks so as not to insult the president, but he nonetheless managed to anticipate King’s later campaign in Selma by saying, “The Voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of black people who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia who are qualified to vote but lack a sixth-grade education. ‘One Man, one vote’ is the African cry. It is ours, too. It must be ours.” The day’s events overshadowed Lewis’s words, but his remarks were a sign that the movement’s unity was more apparent than real.4
THE BIRMINGHAM BOMBING WAS RETRIBUTION FOR THE PROGRESS THAT King had made in the South as well as the triumphant March on Washington, but rather than deterring protestors in Selma, it galvanized them. The violence in other parts of the South renewed homegrown activists’ determination not to suffer such terrorization silently. The nature of the struggle in Selma was changing. Previously much of the official resistance to the activists’ efforts had been manifested in intimidation, harassment, and bureaucratic obstacles; private citizens perpetrated what violence the activists had endured, and they had done so surreptitiously, out of the public eye. But as the movement there gained new momentum in the wake of the Birmingham tragedy, Selma would also witness a surge in reactionary violence, and that change would mark an important, if lamentable, new chapter in the struggle for voting rights.
Saddened and angry by the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, teenage activists Chuck Bonner and Cleo Hobbs searched for a way to honor the memory of the four girls. The pair called SNCC headquarters for instructions because they’d never participated in a demonstration, and without Lafayette to guide them, they didn’t know what to do. But nobody in Atlanta could help, so they decided to act alone. On September 16 Bonner and Hobbs gathered a few friends and marched to Carter’s Drugstore, which refused to serve blacks at its lunch counter. When Willie Robinson, nineteen, and Lulu Brown, fifteen, took stools, Harmon Carter, the owner, ordered them to leave. They refused, so he called Sheriff Clark, who sent his posse to eject them. Carter himself struck Robinson in the head with an axe handle, and another officer shocked Brown with a cattle prod. An ambulance took them away while deputies arrested the other demonstrators. Carter was not arrested or charged for assaulting Robinson. After the Civil Rights Act became law in July 1964, he removed his counter so he would not have to serve blacks.
On the same day as the demonstration at Carter’s Drugstore, young activists also sat in at Kress’s Drugs, local libraries, and the Thirsty Boy, a whites-only drive-in restaurant. In the next few days almost one thousand students refused to attend school; those found by police in the streets were arrested for violating truancy laws. Between September 16 and October 3, 250 youngsters between the ages of six and twenty-one were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly, parading without a permit, picketing, and trespass. Most spent a day to a week behind bars. “The Movement was on,” Bonner said later.5
Also seeking their own revenge for the bombings were King’s aides Diane Nash and James Bevel, a married couple and veteran civil rights activists who, like Lafayette, had been part of Reverend James Lawson Jr.’s nonviolence workshops, the resulting Nashville movement, and the Freedom Rides. They had also been intimately involved in the recent struggle in Birmingham. Bevel had played an especially important role in bringing children into Birmingham’s streets, so he felt almost personally responsible for the bombing and loss of life. “We felt like our own children had been killed,” Nash later said. Both were so angry that they considered rejecting nonviolence to pursue the bombers and kill them.
There was something of the odd couple about this pair. Nash, brilliant and beautiful, was a Chicago-born, middle-class Catholic and a runner-up in the Miss Illinois pageant. Bevel came from Itta Bena, Mississippi, was the thirteenth of seventeen children, had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy for insubordination, worked as a bricklayer, and sang in a doo-wop group before God called him to the ministry. He was “like no one I’d ever met before,” John Lewis later recalled when the two encountered one another at American Baptist. “Wild. Crazy. . . . A man who . . . worshipped the Scriptures so much that he [wore] a skullcap to honor the prophets of the Old Testament.” Despite their different backgrounds and personalities, Nash and Bevel shared a passionate dedication to the movement—a commitment that inevitably brought them together.6
That commitment led them to reject their inclination to murder the bombers. Instead, they recommended a militant version of the peaceful March on Washington, one that targeted Governor Wallace. In it, thousands would march on Montgomery to isolate George Wallace in his own capital. Their plan included cutting Montgomery off from the rest of the state with an army of students and sympathizers who would disrupt rail, bus, and even plane travel to and from the capital. They would register every Alabama resident of voting age, launch a general strike, and ask President Kennedy to withhold federal funding from Alabama and withdraw recognition of Wallace’s government. Such measures would, they hoped, draw even more national attention to their cause and put immediate political pressure on Wallace, forcing him to take decisive steps to end the injustices in Alabama. Nash took their proposal to Birmingham, where King was officiating at the funerals of the young girls.7
King listened politely but rejected their plan. He thought it was just too impractical and so radical that it would damage the movement. Although disappointed, both Nash and Bevel remained committed to what they called GROW—Get Rid of Wallace—and over the next year Bevel often went to Selma to assist the organizers working there. “If it took twenty years,” Nash later said, “we were going to get the right to vote in Alabama.”8
Jim Forman, along with John Lewis, Lafayette’s former roommate at the American Baptist Theological Seminary and SNCC’s current executive secretary, came to Selma eight days after the church bombing. Both saw immediately that Lafayette had succeeded: Selma, which Forman had once urged Lafayette to avoid because the situation there seemed so hopeless, had become “an important center of resistance,” Forman thought. To Lewis, the city “looked like a different place. Tensions were incredibly high. Armed troopers and police were everywhere.” That night Lewis spoke to an immense audience at the First Baptist Church while fifty Alabama state troopers, armed with machine guns and commanded by their leader, Colonel Al Lingo, stood guard.9
The next day, September 24, Lewis, holding a sign reading “One Man, One Vote,” was arrested for unlawful assembly while picketing the courthouse. Herded into a waiting bus by posse men with cattle prods, he and the others were driven to the Selma Prison Farm, a facility that reminded Lewis of Mississippi’s infamous Parchman Penitentiary. His cell, filled to capacity with other demonstrators, contained only soiled mattresses and a single sink and toilet. The floor was so dirty that he ate standing up. It took several weeks for him to win his freedom.10
Meanwhile, Jim Forman continued the struggle for voting rights, hoping that Jim Clark’s brutality against the demonstrators would force the federal government to intervene. Forman also conceived of a new initiative, under which massive numbers of Selma’s black citizens would gather peacefully at the courthouse to register. He designated the effort, set for October 7, as Freedom Day. To energize his troops, Forman invited comedian Dick Gregory, whose caustic wit had won him national fame, to address a rally just before the event. Gregory didn’t hesitate—he had participated in movement activities in Greenwood, Mississippi, had come to Birmingham when King called him, and had attended the March on Washington in August. His wife, Lillian, was equally passionate about civil rights. Although pregnant, she also came to Selma to join in the Freedom Day march.11
On Sunday night, October 6, Gregory entered African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church flanked by Clark’s posse. There were police inside as well as out, waiting to record his every word. Gregory didn’t disappoint his fans or his enemies. He attacked Clark and his men, calling them “peons, the idiots who do all the dirty work, the dogs who do all the biting.” The audience cheered; never had a black man dared to talk to a white man that way, let alone a cop or state trooper.
“You tell ’em, brother,” someone called out, and the rest laughed.
Go out and support the kids, Gregory urged. Register! Vote! If his audience would do that, he said, then “freedom will run all over this town.”
Thunderous applause followed, and when it subsided Jim Forman took the stage. “Call . . . people,” he instructed, “and tell them to come down to the courthouse tomorrow, that it’s freedom day. You take a baloney sandwich and a glass of cool water and go down there and stay all day.” The message was clear: the marchers would need both numbers and stamina on Freedom Day if they were to have any chance at success.12
Forman awoke early the next morning tired and worried about what the day would bring. Before leaving he pocketed a bottle of Maalox tablets to sooth the ulcer he had developed during his work in the movement. Among other things, Forman was still concerned about the turnout for Freedom Day, knowing that a large presence at the courthouse was crucial to the marchers’ success. About that, at least, Forman needn’t have worried.
A short time later Forman, accompanied by the writer James Baldwin, discovered that there were already about 125 people lined up at the courthouse. They were older men and women, dressed neatly. By 10 a.m. there were 175, the line beginning to snake around the corner. Forman happily greeted them: “Now you just [wait] here . . . and get some sunshine,” he said. Present too was Sheriff Clark, with a gold star pinned prominently to his chest and wearing a green helmet emblazoned with the Confederate flag. He was supported by 50 state troopers and 40 posse men, all armed with guns, cattle prods, and nightsticks; they walked along the sidewalk close to the waiting people.13
By noon there were three hundred people waiting to enter the courthouse, but only twelve had actually gone in and applied. Clark’s men took pictures of those inside, another deterrent to registering. Those outside knew they would probably not be among the lucky ones that day, and they were growing hungry and thirsty; still, they waited. Other activists attempted to encourage them. Across the street, on the steps of the Federal Building, stood two SNCC workers holding signs that read “Register to Vote” and “Register Now for Freedom Now.” When Sheriff Clark saw them, he and three deputies hurried over. They grabbed their signs while Clark bellowed, “You’re under arrest for unlawful assembly.” A couple of white observers cheered him on, yelling, “Get ’em, Big Jim! Get ’em!” As two FBI agents and two Justice Department lawyers stood silently by, SNCC workers were taken to a waiting police car and driven away.14
Forman’s next challenge was to feed those in line, which had now grown to 350 people. Clark’s men had told them that if they left to eat, drink, or use the bathroom, they might as well not return. Forman, chewing Maalox tablets, joined Amelia Boynton to discuss this problem with Sheriff Clark. Historian Howard Zinn, a scholar-participant of the civil rights movement, was also there and came along to record their conversation. “We’d like to bring food to these people on line. They’ve been waiting all day,” Forman told Clark.
Freedom Day, 1963. Sheriff Clark and his deputies arrest two demonstrators for “unlawful assembly.” © DANNY LYON/MAGNUM PHOTOS
“They will not be molested in any way,” an angry Clark replied.
“Does giving them food mean molesting them?” Amelia Boynton asked.
If the applicants were touched, Clark warned, he would arrest Forman and Boynton.
Forman tried another approach: “They’re standing on line to register to vote, and we’d like to explain registration procedure to them.” It was his right, he said.
Clark was unreachable. “Your civil rights be damned. They will not be molested in any way, and that includes talking to them.”15
Howard Zinn conferred with Dick Wasserstrom, a Justice Department lawyer. It was now two o’clock, Zinn said, and people were hungry and especially thirsty from standing under a hot sun; surely the federal government would rescue the folks now surrounded by Clark’s posse. “Is there any reason why a representative of the Justice Department can’t go over and talk to the state troopers and say these people are entitled to food and water?” asked Zinn. The question clearly bothered the lawyer, and he took a moment to reply. “I won’t do it,” Wasserstrom finally said. “I believe they do have the right to receive food and water. But I won’t do it.”16
After two o’clock Forman, out of options, decided to defy Clark and bring food to the line, despite knowing what that would cause. His aides Carver Neblett and Avery Williams were the sacrificial lambs for that day, and Forman invited reporters and photographers to join them and witness the response to their charity. In doing so, he reflected an understanding—shared by other leaders of the nonviolent movement—that the media could serve as a crucial tool for publicizing the abuses black southerners suffered and for rallying public sentiment against racial injustices. Provoking outbursts of violence from segregationist authorities had become a cornerstone of the civil rights movement, as was having reporters and cameramen on hand to capture the atrocities.
As they approached the line with sandwiches and drinks, Major Joe Smelley, leading the state troopers, yelled, “Move on!” When they didn’t, Smelley shouted to his troopers, “Get ’em out of here, they are just trying to cause trouble.” A trooper pushed Neblett, and he dropped to the ground to protect himself. Williams joined him. “Let me at ’em,” cried several deputies, and twelve state troopers quickly surrounded Neblett and Williams, kicking them and striking them with billy clubs. At least one jabbed Neblett with a cattle prod—Zinn saw his body convulse.17
The photographers moved in, and the sound of their flashbulbs popping covered the men’s cries. “Get in front of those cameramen,” Smelley yelled, and the troopers first blocked them, then attacked them. One trooper tried to strike CBS News’s Wendell Hoffman in the groin, but Hoffman used his camera to deflect the blow. A reporter from the Montgomery Reporter wasn’t as lucky: a posse man punched him in the mouth. Meanwhile, officers dragged Neblett and Williams away and threw them on a bus. When they arrived at the jail, the beatings resumed—this time out of sight of the cameras.18
Forman feared that the police assault would cause the voters’ line to break; instead, it held and even grew longer as the afternoon waned. The registrar’s office closed at 4:30, and only then did the people, some of whom had waited more than seven hours, disperse.19
The day ended with a jubilant rally at the Baptist Tabernacle Church. Six hundred people attended, and although three city patrol cars were stationed outside and one sheriff’s car drove around the back from time to time, not a single policeman or state trooper entered the sanctuary. “We ought to be happy today,” Jim Forman said, “because we did something great. Jim Clark never saw that many niggers down there!”
The crowd laughed and applauded.
“Yeah, there was Jim Clark, rubbin’ his head and his big, fat belly; he was shufflin’ today like we used to. He never thought we could get that many people to the courthouse to register. Well, the white man has had us shuffling for 300 years,” Forman concluded. “We’re going to catch up with him and he knows it.”20
Reflecting on the day’s events twenty-two years later, Jim Forman wrote, “There would be other events called Freedom Day in various parts of the South. But there would never be one like the first Freedom Day: the day when a century of southern fear and terror—of night riding Klansmen, of the smooth talking but equally murderous White Citizens’ Council, of the vicious George Wallaces—when all these forces had not been able to stop the forward thrust of a people determined by any means to be free.” Of course, a century’s fear could not disappear in a single day, nor did the terror cease with Freedom Day—there would be more trials to come. But something had indeed changed within Selma’s black community. Rather than being cowed by the white establishment, the city’s black adults—those who knew the stakes better than the young activists and who also had more to lose—took a stand. They had done so despite the risks involved, and they withstood the intimidation and abuse of white officials who had been determined to stop them. John Lewis realized this, later calling Freedom Day “the turning point in the right to vote.”21
The optimism Freedom Day created endured over the next few months but eventually ended in disappointment. At first the signals from Washington had been encouraging. On October 3, 1963, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which had jurisdiction over Alabama and five other southern states, ordered the Board of Registrars there to ease the way applicants were questioned both orally and in writing. Moreover, if they were rejected on grounds of character, they were now entitled to a hearing to defend themselves. Black citizens of Selma again flocked to the courthouse. In October 215 were able to apply, the greatest number in recent history, and interest remained high until February 1964. At that time the Board introduced a more difficult test, created by the Alabama Supreme Court. Those who had managed to apply for their voter registration test found themselves being ultimately rejected in as great a number as before. The federal government would need to be doing much more if it truly wanted to safeguard the voting rights of black Alabamians.22
Although the civil rights movement was working through these setbacks, it was also reeling from a different sort of tragedy. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy, the man who in June had promised black Americans a bill guaranteeing their access to public accommodations, was gunned down in Dallas. Now Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas was president, and his weak record on civil rights as a representative and senator was not reassuring. In his first speech to Congress as president, Johnson had pledged to continue Kennedy’s policies and urged swift passage of Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill, which was tied up on Capitol Hill; whether this was just soothing rhetoric or a real commitment to civil rights remained to be seen. Many civil rights leaders had been critical of Kennedy’s reluctance to help them until 1963, when Bull Connor’s atrocities had pushed him to make a greater effort. Compared to the new president, however, Kennedy’s death seemed a dark portent for the future.23
For Selma’s activists the year 1963 had also ended on a depressing note. On December 30 Sheriff Clark had exacted his revenge for Freedom Day. Accompanied by County Solicitor Blanchard McLeod and four deputies, Clark broke into SNCC headquarters, assaulted twenty-one-year-old organizer James Austin, and arrested him and six colleagues. “We’ve been after you for a long time,” Clark told the injured Austin. The charge was “illegal circulation of literature promoting a boycott.” Still angry after beating Austin, Clark tore the telephone out of the wall and scooped up affidavits, leaflets, and other records. Next, his group entered Freedom House, a three-room apartment where some SNCC workers lived, and destroyed it.24
Seven months later, however, spirits within the movement lifted. On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Kennedy’s successor had proven himself to be a stronger supporter of civil rights than activists had anticipated, and he had taken up the cause of Kennedy’s initiative with unexpected zeal. With the passage of the act, black residents of Selma were free, theoretically, to eat at Carter’s Drug Store or at the Thirsty Boy Drive-In, and they legally could sit anywhere they wanted at the Walton or Wilby movie theaters or even rent a room at the exclusive Hotel Albert. But integration did not come as quickly as a stroke of the president’s pen.
On the afternoon of July 4 four black college students visited the Thirsty Boy, but the owner turned them away and immediately called Sheriff Clark. Clark quickly arrived with his deputies and arrested the students, shocking one with a cattle prod in the process. One young woman was charged with carrying a concealed weapon when a search of her purse turned up a bicycle chain and lock. Later that day a group of black teenagers were admitted to the Wilby Theater without resistance and sat in the formerly forbidden white section. But when others appeared at 5:30, white citizens cried, “There’s niggers in the Wilby!” and tried to prevent their entrance. The sheriff and his posse soon arrived, attacking the black moviegoers, then scattering both them and their white challengers. Some of the white men ran into the theater looking for the original group of black patrons. The vigilantes ran the teenagers out of the theater with the help of Clark’s men, and the sheriff closed the theater to all patrons.25
And for the first time a Voters League mass meeting ended in violence. On the night of July 5, as the crowd of attendees left their meeting place, they ran into fifty to sixty posse men and deputies. A riot ensued. Deputies later claimed that rocks thrown from a nearby alley struck them and that, after hearing a gunshot, they fired tear gas at their alleged assailants. Jerry DeMuth, a writer working with SNCC, recalled the incident differently. As people were leaving, the posse men attacked them without provocation. DeMuth was struck in the head while his colleague, a photographer, was beaten and his camera destroyed. Solicitor McLeod ordered them to leave Selma immediately, regardless of their wounds. The violence rippled out from the hall. The deputies attacked two black residents living a few blocks away and shattered the windows of other African Americans’ homes. By the time Sheriff Clark arrived fifteen minutes later, the excitement was over. But the incident could leave activists with no doubt that they were hitting a nerve; segregationist violence could only mean that their efforts in Selma were working.26
The holiday violence did not deter the Voters League; indeed, it intensified their desire to again try to register. Monday, July 6, was the first of five special registration days, and black applicants began to line up early in the morning for the event. Jim Clark’s troops were there too. Deputies and posse men patrolled the entire neighborhood surrounding the courthouse as well as the building itself. Applicants could enter through only one doorway under the watchful eyes of Clark’s men.
John Lewis had come out for the registration day and quickly found himself confronting Sheriff Clark. “I know you,” a furious Jim Clark said. “You are here to cause trouble.” Clark began slapping his nightstick in the palm of his hand. “You don’t live here. You are an agitator and that’s the lowest form of humanity,” he said.
Lewis disagreed. “Sheriff, I may be an agitator,” he said, “but I’m not an outside agitator. I grew up only ninety miles from here. These people invited us to come and we’re going to stay until they are registered to vote.”
Clark wasted no time in arresting Lewis, but this time the sherriff cast his net even wider, seizing any black bystanders watching from the courthouse steps or even those who happened to be in the area engaged in other business. A United Press International (UPI) journalist using a public phone to report the story of the mass arrest was forcibly yanked from the phone booth. In all, fifty-three people were jailed, twelve of them adolescents or younger. Posse men prodded them with billy clubs and burned them with cattle prods as they force-marched them five blocks to the county jail. None of the fifty-three were formally charged then; the next day each received a predated warrant signed with a rubber stamp by an officer who had no knowledge of how the warrant would be used. They were charged with “interfering with a court in session”—a grand jury had been meeting, unbeknownst to the activists. Later there were additional charges for the adults, such as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, as some of those arrested were underage.27
More arrests followed over the next several days. Reverend Frederick Reese, a teacher at Hudson High School and member of the Voters League, was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor for driving two youngsters to a courthouse demonstration on July 8. The next day the number of activists in jail rose to seventy when more demonstrators were picked up. The return on their efforts was negligible: of the ninety men and women who tried to register that week, only six succeeded.
Because it seemed that almost nothing could deter the applicants, Sheriff Clark and Solicitor McLeod chose another, more far-reaching legal tactic. Seeking a judicial order that would undercut the powers of the civil rights “agitators,” they turned to Circuit Court Judge James A. Hare, the aristocratic leader of Selma’s segregationists. The short, slight, fifty-seven-year-old Hare could conceivably have become governor of Alabama—he certainly had the connections to make a strong bid for the position—but seemed content being a prosperous cattle rancher and, since 1956, a circuit court judge, albeit a very powerful one.28
Hare was also a passionate racist who believed he could identify a black’s African roots simply by looking at him. Selma’s “blue-gummed Nigras,” he argued, descended from “Ebos” and “Angols,” the “riff raff and river rats” of their race. “You will not be able to domesticate them any more than you can get a zebra to pull a plow, or an apache to pick cotton,” he once said. According to Hare, the Justice Department and Martin Luther King Jr., who had “selected Selma for assassination back in the fall of 1963,” had stirred up the city’s African Americans. The city had been “subjected to something fantastic and terroristic,” yet Selma’s whites had “shown unbelievable restraint,” Hare claimed. Earlier that very month he had told J. L. Chestnut that “If these unsanitary, unbathed ruffians think we are going to lie down and give Selma over to them, they have another thought coming. I am not going to sit idly by while they destroy this city.”29
Hare kept his promise. On July 9, 1964, he issued an injunction that almost destroyed Alabama’s civil rights movement. Hare’s judicial order was directed against all civil rights leaders and organizations, including SNCC, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP (which Alabama had banned in 1956), and the Dallas County Voters League. (He threw in the Klan and the Nazi Party for good measure.) His list covered almost everyone: Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Amelia Boynton, James Bevel, Marie Foster, Frederick Reese, Reverend L. L. Anderson, J. L. Chestnut, and thirty-three other activists. Hare’s judicial order stipulated that if three or more of the named people or other members of the named organizations gathered together, they could be arrested and jailed. Civil rights attorneys quickly asked federal judge Daniel Thomas (a racial moderate but no friend of the movement) to dismiss Hare’s injunction as a gross violation of the First Amendment, but he agreed only to consider the lawyers’ request and rule on it at some future time. Nor would Thomas issue a temporary stay prohibiting the injunction until he made a decision about its constitutionality. (His ruling did not come until April 1965, at which point events had rendered it irrelevant.)30
Hare’s injunction was ruinous. Mass meetings and rallies disappeared in Alabama, and voter applications declined to their lowest number in years. Only one small ray of hope existed: a new mayor had recently come to power, bringing an end to the long, reactionary regime of Chris Heinz. Joe T. Smitherman could not have differed more from the wealthy, well-connected Heinz. Orphaned young, the skinny, “jug-eared” Smitherman had clawed his way up the economic ladder, becoming a successful appliance salesman before turning to politics and winning a seat on the city council. A segregationist less rabid than Heinz, he, like other young, moderate bankers, lawyers, and merchants in Selma, feared that the city’s racial problems would ruin its reputation and prevent northern businessmen from investing in municipal businesses.
Inaugurated in October, Smitherman’s earliest actions encouraged Selma’s black community that the future might be somewhat better than the past. The city council, at the mayor’s request, established a new agency, the office of public safety. The agency’s director, Wilson Baker, a professional police officer and an enemy of Sheriff Clark, promised to treat all of Selma’s citizens courteously and fairly. Previously Mayor Heinz had given Clark the authority to handle all civil rights disturbances, and the results had been disastrous. Now Baker was in charge of city law enforcement, and he commanded Selma’s police officers as well as Clark and his deputies. Clark’s domain was relegated to the area around the courthouse and beyond the city limits.
Baker, like Smitherman, gave black residents of Selma some reason to hope. Speaking to the exclusive Selma Exchange Club, whose members included Judge Hare and ex-Mayor Heinz, Baker announced that, given recent court and congressional actions, segregation was ending and that he would “lead Selma in dignity” to a more integrated society. Most importantly, Baker later announced that he would not enforce Judge Hare’s infamous injunction because it was now being challenged by the Justice Department and evaluated by federal judge Thomas. For a black community that had long been abused by reactionary public officials, Baker’s decisions, compared to Clark’s, must have seemed almost unbelievably progressive.31
There were other encouraging signs of change as well. Reverend Ralph Smeltzer of Pennsylvania’s Church of the Brethren had been working quietly in Selma for more than a year, reaching out to moderates in both the white and black communities in order to broaden the base of support for further desegregation within the city. His efforts were beginning to bear fruit. A public housing project for Craig Air Force Base servicemen was integrated in May 1964, as were extension classes at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, a ninety-minute drive away. Restaurant owners were seriously considering serving blacks, as now required by law. Public libraries again had furniture so black citizens could sit and read there.32
For Amelia Boynton and others in the Dallas County Voters League, these changes, though encouraging, were too modest to be satisfying. Yes, the racial signs that marked the water fountains in the courthouse and city hall had been removed, but the bathrooms were still segregated. Chief Baker was certainly preferable to Sheriff Clark, but Clark was still a threatening presence in Selma, and the new mayor had also chosen McLean Pitts, an ardent segregationist, as city attorney. Moreover, the White Citizens’ Council, three thousand strong, remained a powerful force, willing to destroy the businesses of moderates, regardless of race. “We are not going to give in,” said one Selma official. “If we let them have one inch, they would want to go all the way.” The idea of black citizens using water fountains and restaurants was one thing; the idea of them enjoying political parity with white Americans was quite another. But Amelia Boynton was not deterred—she had been fighting for voting rights for more than thirty years, and she was not about to stop now. So she decided to enlist Martin Luther King Jr. in her cause.33
On November 11, as she drove to Birmingham for a meeting with King, SCLC’s leaders were discussing their next moves. At first King thought of moving into the North to attack segregation and poverty there, but his aides recommended a voting rights campaign somewhere in the Deep South. Jim Bevel had been urging a return to Alabama to fight for voting rights since the church bombing fourteen months earlier, and he did so again that day. C. T. Vivian, Bernard Lafayette’s friend from the Nashville days, agreed. Selma could be “a rallying point,” he said, one that could be used to “stir the whole nation.” King realized that shifting the focus to Selma would mean confronting Sheriff Clark, but if he was as bad as Bull Connor, then a public, bloody confrontation would actually be advantageous. Bull Connor’s violence had forced Kennedy to act, and the result was the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Clark was cut from the same cloth, King suspected, and his brutality might help create a voting rights act.34
King knew that only the federal government could guarantee the voting rights of black southerners, as it had recently done for their right to use public accommodations. Although the Civil Rights Act contained a minor voting provision that prohibited the unequal application of voter registration requirements, it did not provide for federal registrars to go south to help black citizens actually vote. What was needed was either a constitutional amendment or more desirable, national legislation that eliminated literacy tests and other obstacles preventing black Americans from voting. King knew that until they could speak their voice at the polls and hold politicians accountable for their actions, African Americans would never see any true change in their communities. And until the federal government was willing to back up its rhetoric about voting with enforcement, states and their white-led districts would continue to deprive black residents of this fundamental right.
Now, as the result of President Johnson’s great electoral victory a week earlier, the federal government might be willing to match words with deeds. Not since the early New Deal had a Democratic president had such overwhelming liberal majorities in both houses of the next Congress, and Johnson had already expressed his desire to eliminate poverty and injustice, to create what he called the Great Society. Surely there would be room for a voting rights act on Johnson’s legislative agenda.35
The November 11 meeting ended without a final decision as to the location and tactics for the SCLC’s next move. That decision came the next day, when Amelia Boynton met with King and described to him life in Selma under the Hare injunction: the paralyzed movement, the decline in voter applications, the despairing activists. King should, she hoped, make Selma his next priority. Ralph Abernathy, King’s closest friend, also pushed strongly for Selma as the “site to fight our next battle.” Any doubts that King had whether Selma was the best site for this new campaign now vanished. Assignments were made: Bevel would be in charge of direct action, and Vivian would meet with the Dallas County Voters League to win their approval and, thus, avoid a turf war.36
Boynton had not exaggerated the problems or the divisions inside the movement, as Vivian learned during his meeting with the Voters League leaders in Selma. Some were still wary of King, fearful that his star quality would “destroy” their organization, as one critic put it. Others remained loyal to SNCC; after all, Lafayette and Forman had come when no one else would. Even King had gone to Birmingham rather than Selma. But they understood that SNCC had “just about run its course,” as Reverend Reese put it, and that the movement “needed some rejuvenation.” Moreover, there were signs that the moment was right to step up its efforts in Selma. The changes in Selma’s government, however minimal, suggested that the segregationists were not as unified as they had once been. Vivian convinced the Selma activists that SCLC was committed to the struggle, which went far beyond Selma. “We wanted to raise the issue of voting . . . as a way to shake Alabama,” he later remembered telling them, “so that it would no longer be a Selma issue or even an Alabama issue but a national issue.” Their city was “an ideal place to do it.” Reassured, the League authorized Boynton to formally invite Dr. King to come to Selma. Vivian told them that a tentative date for King’s arrival had been set: January 2, 1965.37
JUST AS SAM BOYNTON HAD PASSED THE TORCH OF LEADERSHIP IN THE Selma movement to Bernard Lafayette and he, in turn, had passed it to Jim Forman, now that responsibility fell to Martin Luther King Jr. And he was worried that he might not be strong enough to bear it.
King wasn’t worried about his health, although it was not good. Two months before he met with Amelia Boynton in Birmingham, his doctors had forced him to check into Atlanta Hospital for treatment of exhaustion, high blood pressure, and a viral infection. But those troubles were not uppermost in King’s mind. Nor did he fear the personal threats that increased every day. He was long accustomed to the midnight phone calls (“Listen, nigger . . . if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we gonna blow your brains out.”) and the crosses burned on his front lawn. His home had been bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956. In 1958 a lunatic stabbed him in the chest, and although the deadly seven-inch blade came close to piercing his heart, he survived. Then, in 1964 an airplane he boarded was ordered back to the terminal due to a bomb threat, but he had lived through that too.38
In the early days of King’s career as the foremost spokesman for the civil rights movement, the possibility—indeed the likelihood—that he might be killed did frighten him. The apostle of nonviolence carried a gun and surrounded himself with bodyguards. But in a moment of emotional agony, he prayed, “Lord, I’m losing my courage”; he then heard what he believed was “the voice of Jesus” urging him to persevere and “stand up for truth [and] righteousness.” Suddenly, his fear diminished and all doubt vanished. The next morning he told his parishioners, “I am not afraid of anybody.”39
Nor was he especially anxious about the coming Selma campaign, although he knew it would be dangerous. “Somebody was going to get killed,” he told his colleagues. But the cause was too important to turn back now.40
What King feared most was a personal scandal that threatened to destroy him along with the civil rights movement just at the moment that the movement hoped to win its most important victory: securing a guarantee of black Americans’ voting rights.41
Movements like King’s that challenged the existing social order especially worried the one Washington official who considered himself the guardian of domestic harmony: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. For a time the fear of domestic Communism occupied his time, but now, in 1964, he became obsessed with the changes in racial relationships that the civil rights movement brought about. As early as the 1920s Hoover, then a young Justice Department official, had fought Black Nationalism; during World War II he had called Negroes a “seditious minded group.” As King rose to prominence, so did the director’s fears. When FBI surveillance of the movement in the late 1950s revealed that King’s adviser Stanley Levison had once had Communist Party connections, Hoover’s two great passions—anti-Communism and fighting black activism—combined to lead him into what eventually became a full-scale assault on King.42
By 1964 Hoover had become less concerned about King’s political affiliations than about the shocking news his agents had discovered while tracking the reverend’s recent travels: King apparently had a voracious sexual appetite that no number of women could satisfy. The Bureau’s surveillance was all-encompassing: King’s mail was opened, he was followed by agents equipped with cameras when he vacationed abroad, and listening devices were installed in his home, offices, and, if the FBI could gain admission first, in every hotel room in which he stayed. This most recent—and, to Hoover, most important—information had come from the bugs planted in King’s room at Washington’s Willard Hotel on January 7, 1964. They recorded what sounded like “a lively, drunken party involving King, several colleagues, and two women from Philadelphia.”
To Hoover, the recordings offered solid evidence that King was depraved. The reality, of course, was more complicated. King often attracted women parishioners who were drawn to him like fans to an adored celebrity. King’s career, with its constant travel as well as attendant dangers, strained his marriage and gave him the opportunity to indulge his desires, which he considered “a form of anxiety reduction.”
Whatever pleasure King’s philandering brought him, he also suffered greatly from the profound and tormenting guilt he felt about his betrayals. He knew he was violating creeds he strongly believed in: morality and fidelity, to both his wife and the movement he cherished. “Each of us is two selves,” he once sermonized. “And the great burden of life is to always try to keep that higher self in command. Don’t let the lower self take over.” But sometimes it did. “I make mistakes morally,” he admitted, “and . . . ask God to forgive me. . . . There is a Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll in us.” King’s struggle between his private and public lives may well explain the risks he took in the movement, for only in suffering was there redemption; saving the soul of America would, King may have hoped, win this sinner a place in the Kingdom of Heaven.43
The announcement on October 15, 1964, that King had won the Nobel Peace Prize did not lift his spirits. He thanked the Swedish officials and said that he would accept the honor at the ceremony in Oslo in December on behalf of the movement he led. “History has thrust me in this position,” he said. “It would be both immoral and a sign of ingratitude if I did not face up to my moral responsibility to do what I can in this struggle.”44
Hoover’s reaction to King’s award was incendiary. On a news clipping that carried the story, Hoover scrawled, “King could well qualify for the ‘top alley cat prize.’” He also sent reports of King’s philandering to the president, the attorney general, and other officials. On November 18 Hoover attacked King publicly for the first time, calling him “a notorious liar”; in private he told reporters that King was “one of the lowest characters in the country.” Hoover’s remarks stunned King. In response, he issued a sympathetic statement asserting that the director had “apparently faltered under the awesome . . . responsibilities of his office.” Privately, FBI taps revealed King’s true sentiments: Hoover, he told an aide, was “old and getting senile,” and President Johnson should force him to retire.45
Hoping to repair their relationship, King met with Hoover on December 1, when the SCLC’s plans for Selma were taking shape. Both men spoke past one another and never discussed what divided them. Further, while they talked, FBI officials offered derogatory information about King to a reporter who was waiting outside hoping for an interview. King also later learned that agents were even then visiting important journalists, offering them copies of King’s FBI files for their use, so long as no one cited the Bureau as their source. “We’re not a peephole journal,” the Atlanta Constitution’s Eugene Patterson told the agent who approached him with the classified material. “What you’re doing is the story . . . the federal police force . . . doing this to an individual citizen.” Surprisingly, there were no takers, and King’s activities remained secret.46
Just as serious as its ongoing efforts to malign King in the media was the malicious plan the Bureau hatched even before King’s meeting with Hoover. FBI assistant director William Sullivan decided that the FBI could use King’s own voice to destroy him. Officials prepared a tape recording of his various assignations accompanied by an anonymous letter urging King to kill himself. The FBI called it “the suicide package.” They gave it to a veteran FBI agent, who flew to Miami, where he mailed the box to King at SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. With any luck it would arrive in time for Thanksgiving, hopefully spoiling what the Bureau anticipated would be the last holiday King would ever celebrate.47
But the FBI had miscalculated. The package, which appeared to contain a reel of tape, joined the many other cards and letters that normally piled up at the SCLC office every month. Eventually an aide delivered it and the other mail to the King home, where it lay unopened—for the time being.
What should have been a glorious occasion—the December 1964 trip to Europe to receive the Nobel Prize—was, for King, an agonizing time. “Only Martin’s family and close staff members knew how depressed he was during the entire Nobel Trip,” Coretta Scott King later recalled. “He was worried that the rumors might hurt the movement and he was concerned about what black people would think. . . . We had to work with him and help him out of his depression. Somehow he managed all the official functions, the speeches, the whole trip and the public never knew what he was going through.” In Oslo he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the movement’s foot soldiers, who he described as the “humble children of God [who] were willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake.”48
King’s private sufferings notwithstanding, his selection for the Nobel Prize marked an outpouring of support for him and the civil rights movement both abroad and in the United States. At thirty-five King was the youngest man to win the prize and only the second African American. Many of his countrymen—white and black—took pride in his achievement. New York celebrated King’s return to America with fire boats in the East River, dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey, and a “Martin Luther King Night” at the Harlem Armory.49
King’s visit to Washington at President Johnson’s invitation on December 18 was less extravagant, a reflection of the president’s ambivalent feelings for the preacher. Given Johnson’s Texas-size ego and insecurities, there was little room for others on the national stage. He resented the international attention King was receiving and complained to aides that his own efforts, like winning congressional passage of Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill, went unappreciated. He disliked demonstrations and resented being pressured by the young black activists who had the nerve to picket his White House. He also feared that developing a close relationship with King—in light of Hoover’s discoveries—might tarnish him in the eyes of the American people, although he permitted the FBI director to disseminate his vicious reports on King throughout the government.
The president would have preferred working with other, more conservative civil rights leaders like Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, who Johnson called “team players.” Still fresh in his mind were those activists who had caused him trouble during the recent presidential campaign, like CORE’s James Farmer, who had refused his request to call off demonstrations that Johnson thought would only help the Republicans. And black Mississippians had created a more serious threat to party unity when they organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and hoped to unseat the regular segregationist delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson had feared that if the all-white delegation was ousted, Texas and Georgia delegates would walk out, creating a backlash that would cost him other southern states in the fall. “The only thing that can really screw us good is to seat that group of challengers from Mississippi,” Johnson told Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers. “Now there’s not a damn vote we can get by seating these folks.” Johnson had ordered Senator Hubert Humphrey, beloved by the civil rights community, to forge a compromise that, in the end, pleased neither side but nonetheless avoided the disunity that an always-anxious Johnson believed might cost him the election. For the domineering Johnson, loyalty came first, and Farmer and the Mississippians had made it clear that the movement had other priorities besides fealty to the White House.50
Although King had never been as openly rebellious as those detested groups, Johnson remained suspicious of the reverend. Because of this, their visit was a hurried affair, with Johnson doing most of the talking. After showing King some cherished Johnson family heirlooms, the president launched into a monologue about how much he was doing for black America. His War on Poverty would go a long way to relieve black suffering. “Now what’s Georgia doing?” Johnson asked. “You ought to get back down there and get them to work.” His next destination was Selma, Alabama, King replied, where the movement would fight for voting rights. He hoped that the president would support his efforts by immediately sending a voting rights bill to Congress.
“Martin . . . I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get voting rights through in this session of Congress,” Johnson said. He explained that Congress and the country needed time to adjust to the recent passage of the 1964 Act. Acting precipitously on voting rights would alienate southern legislators, whose votes Johnson needed to pass his Great Society initiatives. The president hoped that programs like Medicare, aid to education, and antipoverty measures would win him a place in history as the greatest president, greater even than his beloved Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was quick to remind King that these programs would aid blacks too—and would be more difficult to get through Congress if the more controversial and divisive voting rights bill came first.
Voting rights was as important as anything else on the president’s agenda, King asserted, but Johnson continued to disagree. “I can’t get it through,” he insisted. “It’s just not the wise and the politically expedient thing to do.”
“We’ll just have to do the best we can,” replied a disappointed King, who then departed the White House for a flight to Atlanta.51
Actually, things were not as bleak as Johnson suggested. He had been considering a voting rights bill as early as July 1964, following the passage of Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act. Johnson’s team was not pleased, however. Exhausted by the long struggle, they looked forward to a rest from such contentious issues. But Johnson was just getting started. After signing the bill on July 2 he told a shocked Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, “I want you to write me the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act that you can devise.” It must also be constitutional and effective. “I could have shot him,” Katzenbach later said. “I was so tired of being down in the halls of Congress on the ’64 act.” But the president had no intention of resting on his laurels after the Civil Rights Act passed. Johnson was “hell bent to get every piece of civil rights legislation he could get,” remembered Larry O’Brien, Johnson’s chief legislative strategist.52
In part, Johnson’s personal history can explain his zeal for civil rights. Early in Johnson’s career, as a Texas representative and senator, he consistently voted with the southerners who opposed antilynching legislation, a Fair Employment Practices Commission, and other civil rights programs. But as his presidential ambitions grew, he knew he had to carefully separate himself from his old friends. He did not sign the Southern Manifesto attacking the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, and as majority leader, he worked to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first since Reconstruction. That act created a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department and a Civil Rights Commission to investigate national voting practices. Further, it empowered the attorney general to punish anyone who interfered or prohibited any citizen from exercising the franchise. The 1957 Civil Rights Act seemed like a step forward, but Johnson, while steering it through the Senate, had weakened its provisions so as not to alienate southerners completely. His attitude toward civil rights seemed to grow more sympathetic in the next few years, however. As Kennedy’s vice president he often privately criticized the president’s reluctance to commit himself to the black cause. Johnson was always torn between his compassion for the underdog and his political ambitions. As president, in 1964 these two inclinations fused when he moved actively to pass Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act, which was lodged in Congress. And a voting rights bill was always on his mind as well. “I initiated . . . the voting rights [bill] myself, nobody else did,” he later claimed.53
Johnson’s landslide victory over Republican senator Barry Goldwater on November 3, 1964, also intensified his desire to push for reform. Democrats now dominated the House of Representatives, 295 to 140, as well as the Senate, 68 to 32—the largest majorities since FDR was president. Following the election Johnson excitedly told an aide that “We can pass it all now.” Everything liberal Democrats had wanted for decades—medical care for the elderly, federal aid to education, help for the crumbling cities, and more—now seemed possible, even inevitable.
But the 1964 election brought bad as well as good news. The South, once the most reliably Democratic section of the country, was beginning to drift away from the party. Goldwater had narrowly won more white votes than Johnson had in ten former Confederate states, except Johnson’s home state of Texas. And in states where civil rights workers were the most active—Alabama and Mississippi—Johnson won only 13 percent and 31 percent of the popular vote, respectively. Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia elected Republicans to Congress for the first time in sixty-five years.
How could such Democratic losses in the South be offset? The election results were clear here too. It had been black votes that brought victory for Johnson in Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, and perhaps North Carolina. Without those black votes the South could go Republican in future presidential elections. If, however, more black voters were registered and they continued to vote Democratic, then Larry O’Brien believed that the GOP’s success could be limited to Alabama and Mississippi, which were probably lost to the Democrats forever because of the party’s support for civil rights.54
Johnson was again thinking about voting rights on December 14, just four days before his secret meeting with King. That was when he told a surprised Katzenbach to begin to draft a bill secretly. There must be “a simple, effective way of getting ’em registered,” Johnson insisted. Katzenbach disagreed; he thought it would take a constitutional amendment to do the job, as the Constitution gave the states the authority to define voting qualifications, a stipulation ostensibly protecting the states that were systematically disenfranchising black voters. “Let’s find some way,” the president said, urging his acting attorney general to think big. “Get me some things you’d be proud of, to show your boy, and say, ‘Here is what your daddy put through in nineteen sixty-four-five-six-seven.’”
Katzenbach sent the president a list of options on December 28. Johnson was surely dismayed to see that the creation of a new law was at the bottom of the list, indicating that it was the least desirable choice. Katzenbach, a cautious, conservative lawyer, still felt that a constitutional amendment would be necessary to alter the time-honored tradition of allowing states to determine their own voting requirements. Such an amendment, he proposed, would require that registrants be twenty-one years of age, be residents of their state for a short time, and have no record of incarceration or confinement in a mental institution. Literacy tests and poll taxes would be eliminated. Although amending the Constitution might be the most “drastic choice,” wrote Katzenbach, he thought it the most “effective”—although opposition was a certainty. Furthermore, its passage would take at least two years, and it needed only thirteen state legislatures to vote no to defeat it.55
The second option Katzenbach put forward would create a new government agency to supervise registration only in federal elections, whereas the last, the one Katzenbach called “least desirable,” would permit an existing agency to control registration in all elections—local, state, and federal. The final option, a new law, Katzenbach noted, “would quickly provide political power to Negroes.” Its constitutionality, however, was doubtful, and Republicans had opposed such an approach when the Kennedy administration considered it in 1963. Even if Johnson could get it through Congress, it would not likely survive a legal challenge.56
Other aides were also urging the president to be cautious. White House counsel Lee White believed that, given the recent passage of the 1964 Act after a long southern filibuster, it would be wise to wait before becoming embroiled in another controversial congressional struggle. Also, because the 1964 Act prohibited the unequal application of voting requirements and extended the investigative power of the Civil Rights Commission, that act should serve to alleviate the voting injustices in the South for the time being. Pending lawsuits in several southern states might also lessen the need for immediate action. If new legislation was required, it could be submitted in 1966, when the majority of the president’s Great Society measures would have passed, and a safe amount of time would have elapsed since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.57
Torn between his desires and constitutional and political realities, Johnson wavered. He had ordered his staff to prepare a voting rights bill, and the possibility of seeking a constitutional amendment remained an option, albeit one Johnson preferred to avoid. For now, while Justice Department lawyers worked their way through this tangled thicket, voting rights would take a backseat to Johnson’s other objectives. Above all, he was intent on doing things his way. If there was to be a voting rights bill, it would be Lyndon Johnson’s, and it would come at a time and place of his choosing.58