FOUR

NOTHING CAN STOP US

SUNDAY, MARCH 7, WAS A PLEASANT DAY FOR THEIR JOURNEY: BALMY WITH a brisk wind and no sign of the snow and rain that had pelted demonstrators earlier. Jonquils and forsythia were starting to bloom—a sign, perhaps, that winter might finally be over. Selma seemed quiet, almost deserted except for a few unhappy-looking people standing on street corners watching the throng pass by. “Black bitch. Got a white boy to play with, huh?” yelled one man at a young female marcher whose companion, Jim Bentson, was white. At Broad Street a white woman driving a pickup truck veered toward Bentson, but he jumped away before she hit him.¹

At about 4:00 p.m. the marchers came to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate general. They saw what John Lewis called “a vast sea of blue”: state troopers wearing blue uniforms and dark blue helmets bearing Confederate emblems, stretched shoulder to shoulder across the four-lane highway. Some sat atop horses that moved restlessly in place. Clark’s personal army, bearing nightsticks, whips, and electric cattle prods, were there too. They were wearing tattered khaki shirts, mismatched pants, and helmets better suited for football games or motorcycle rides than police action. Some were also on horseback, carrying clubs as big as baseball bats. One special deputy had wrapped barbed wire around a rubber hose.²

The marchers could either turn around or, if need be, leap off the bridge and drop one hundred feet into the Alabama River. “Can you swim?” Hosea Williams asked John Lewis.

“No,” Lewis replied.

“Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965. John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and their fellow marchers confront Major John Cloud and Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “You have two minutes to turn around and go back to your church,” commands Major Cloud. Before that time elapsed, the troopers attacked. © 1965 SPIDER MARTIN.

“Neither can I,” Williams said. “But we might have to.”

Instead, Lewis, Williams, and the others walked forward until they were about fifty feet from the troopers. They halted at the voice of the commanding officer coming through a bullhorn: “I am Major Cloud,” he said. “This is an unlawful assembly. This demonstration will not continue. You have been banned by the Governor. Your march is not conducive to the public safety. You are ordered to disperse and go back to your church or to your homes.” While he spoke, the troopers donned gas masks.

“Mr. Major, I would like to have a word,” said Hosea Williams, winner of the lucky coin toss.

“There is no word to be had,” replied Major Cloud.

Williams again asked politely if they could talk, and again Cloud said no, adding, “You have two minutes to turn around and go back to your church.”

There was a momentary silence. Lewis instructed the group to kneel and pray, but only a few got the message. Then, before the time ran out, Cloud yelled, “Troopers, advance.” Turning their nightsticks horizontally, they rushed into the crowd, knocking people over like bowling pins. People fell “to the ground screaming, arms and legs flying . . . packs and bags skittering,” noted Roy Reed of the New York Times. Whoops and cheers came from a crowd of white onlookers, who yelled, “Give it to the niggers.” John Lewis was one of the first to be hit. As he crouched on the ground, praying, a trooper struck him in the head, and he fell over. When he tried to rise he was hit again. “I’m going to die here,” was his last thought before falling back to the ground. Marie Foster and Amelia Boynton were also struck in the head. Foster fell, but Boynton only staggered, so the trooper hit her again and she collapsed. The trooper continued to beat her unconscious body, screaming, “Get up, nigger! Get up and run.” Albert Turner, standing behind Lewis, also fell as bodies knocked him down. When someone called for an ambulance, Jim Clark said, “Let the buzzards eat them.”3

Then came the men on horseback, troopers and posse men alike, swinging their clubs and ropes like cowboys driving cattle to market. Reporters heard rebel yells and Sheriff Clark screaming, “Get those God-damned niggers! And get those God-damned white niggers!” Suddenly there were sounds like gunshots. Troopers were firing and throwing canisters of highly noxious C-4 tear gas—“gas so thick you could almost reach up and grab it,” remembered one of the blinded and sickened victims. Forty canisters were used that day, causing gray clouds of tear gas to spew over the scene, thus preventing Reed and other newsmen and photographers from seeing clearly what was happening. When the haze parted momentarily, Reed saw troopers’ nightsticks raining down on the heads of the marchers. Standing nearby were two young FBI agents taking notes and filming the event. They never tried to stop it.⁴

John Lewis is beaten by troopers. “I’m going to die here,” he thought. © 1965 SPIDER MARTIN.

Amelia Boynton, badly injured, is carried away by fellow marchers. © 1965 SPIDER MARTIN.

And so, coughing, choking, and vomiting, the marchers ran from the bridge back into the streets of Selma, hoping to find safety there. But there was none. Troopers and the posse on horses followed, clubbing them until they fell, then laughing with pure pleasure as they tried to get their horses to rear up and crush the fallen. “Bite the niggers,” one posse man told his horse. Clark’s men also followed in cars, and when they found their targets, they leaped out and whipped them. Still the marchers ran, knapsacks pulled over their heads for protection, trying to get to the First Baptist Church or Brown Chapel. Posse men, now led by Sheriff Clark himself, fired tear gas into First Baptist. Some entered the church, throwing one young man who was inside through a stained-glass window. Wilson Baker, who had jurisdiction over most of downtown Selma, tried to block Clark and his men. But Clark refused to leave. “I’ve already waited a month too damn long about moving in,” he yelled, pushing Baker aside.5

The rampage continued. Troopers patrolled the streets, attacking any black citizens they could find. “Get the hell out of town!” they commanded. “We want all the niggers off the streets.” They entered the Carver housing project, chasing people and throwing tear gas canisters into buildings. More than 150 officers gathered near Brown Chapel, where a few were pelted with bricks and bottles. Charles Bonner, Lafayette’s young recruit, picked up a brick and was about to throw it at a posse man when Jim Bevel stopped him: “Look at this kid’s head bleeding,” he said. “Is that what you really want to do to that trooper?” Bonner dropped the brick and entered the church.⁶

The Brown Chapel parsonage had become a sort of MASH unit staffed by volunteer members of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, an extraordinary group of doctors and nurses committed to treating those who had been injured while fighting for social justice. They cared for nearly one hundred marchers that day: people with cuts, bruises, lacerations, tear gas–related injuries, and fractured and broken arms and legs. Those who had more severe wounds were taken by ambulance to the black-run Good Samaritan Hospital, but that outflow of bodies did little to stem the tide of suffering at Brown Chapel. Somehow John Lewis got back to the church, where he found people on the floor or in pews, moaning and crying. Marie Foster and Amelia Boynton were there unconscious, barely breathing. Lewis had a terrible headache but refused to go to the hospital.⁷

But it was the marchers’ anger as well as their pain that threatened to destroy the nonviolent movement. Running from the posse men or even throwing a few bricks simply wasn’t enough, many of the wounded believed. If Clark really wanted war, they should get guns and bring it to him. Andy Young was able to calm them down—not with King’s lofty claims about suffering and redemption, words now stained with the marchers’ blood, but rather by making them think about violence. “What kind of gun you got, .32, .38?” Young asked them. “How’s that going to hold up against the automatic rifles and their shotguns. . . . You ever see what buckshot does to a deer?” Forcing the marchers to consider “the specifics of violence,” Young thought, led them to conclude that a war against Clark’s overwhelming forces was madness.8

WORD OF THE TRAGEDY ON THE EDMUND PETTUS BRIDGE REACHED KING in Atlanta later on Sunday afternoon. He was grief stricken, feeling that he should have been with the marchers. Given recent events in Marion, he had thought Clark and Lingo would not dare repeat such an atrocity so soon. Their outbursts of violence, after all, severely damaged their cause while creating sympathy for King’s. And as long as they ignored that fact, King and the marchers had an advantage.

Consulting with his top advisers, King decided that there must be another march as soon as possible, perhaps on Tuesday, March 9, so as to give the marchers a day to recuperate and regroup. He also asked movement lawyers to seek an injunction from federal judge Frank M. Johnson, a fair, objective jurist, allowing them to march to Montgomery and prohibiting the Alabamians from violently interfering again.

Always respectful of the Selma activists who had fought alone for decades, King telephoned Frederick Reese, president of the Dallas County Voters League. “I understand you are having trouble over there,” said King with a touch of facetiousness that was meant to comfort the stricken Reese.

“Yeah, we do,” Reese replied, too exhausted to banter.

“Well,” King said, all traces of humor gone, “I’m gonna put out a call for help.”⁹

Ignoring his injuries, Lewis called for a mass meeting that night at Brown Chapel to rally and reunite their forces. Hosea Williams, who had escaped injury by outrunning the troopers and hiding in the home of a friendly bystander, spoke first. “I fought in World War II and I once was captured by the German army and I want to tell you that the Germans never were as inhuman as the state troopers of Alabama.”

Lewis, still wearing his blood- and mud-stained raincoat, electrified the crowd with his unprepared remarks. “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam . . . and he can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama,” he said.

“Tell it,” the church roared.

“Next time we march, we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We may have to go on to Washington.”

“Amen!” and “Yes !” cried his audience. Their show of resiliency seemed to settle something for Lewis. When he finished speaking he finally agreed to go to the hospital.10

AMERICANS WERE NOT IMMEDIATELY AWARE OF WHAT OCCURRED ON THE Edmund Pettus Bridge that Sunday. In 1965 the age of instant communication was still a long way off. Newsmen from ABC, NBC, and CBS who were on the scene that day were uncertain whether their cameras had captured anything, as the film would have to be processed before being shown. Nelson Benton, CBS’s correspondent, felt lucky that he had one of the best cameramen in the business, Laurens Pierce, a fearless Alabamian who loved to cover the most dangerous events, his half glasses pushed up on his head, eye pressed firmly against the lens. But Pierce had the defects of his virtues. His cameras were often held together with tape and chewing gum, and he worried constantly about the quality of his product, often saying, “I think I got it. I mean I hope I got it. I feel like I got it.” That day, he did. And his footage would prove indispensable to Martin Luther King at a critical moment.¹¹

Hoping that their cameras had recorded the most dramatic incident in the history of the civil rights movement, Benton and his competitors drove hurriedly to Montgomery, where technicians at the local affiliates gave the stock a chemical bath to develop the film. Then the correspondents put their bagged film canisters aboard a plane bound for Atlanta, where they would be switched to a flight to New York. There, film editors and producers who had been hastily summoned to the networks’ headquarters would decide what could be shown and when.¹²

King did not yet know that television would soon transform a local event in Selma into a national crisis, but he was well aware of the fundamental power of the media. For years King and his top aides had understood that television, which fed on drama, was the only vehicle that could bring the plight of black Americans into every home in the country. The SCLC’s leaders even timed demonstrations so that they could be shown on the evening news. Young, who had once worked in media, became King’s chief television adviser, urging him to prepare simple messages that would fulfill television’s insatiable need for sound bites. King’s media savviness even affected how he chose cities for new campaigns. Each location had to have the personalities necessary to create a morality play. Bull Connor in Birmingham and Jim Clark in Selma were the perfect antagonists, villains the audience would love to hate. Arouse the conscience of the nation, King believed, and the government would be forced to act. Images rather than words were becoming critical in shaping public opinion.13

King’s strategy was confirmed that Sunday evening. CBS and NBC aired short segments on their West Coast six o’clock evening news shows, but ironically the network that reached the largest audience was ABC News, the third broadcaster to air the fifteen-minute footage from Selma. An estimated forty-eight million people watched ABC’s coverage, although many had not planned to do so. ABC executives, after studying the raw film, had decided to interrupt its Sunday night movie, Stanley Kramer’s critically acclaimed 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg, at a little after 9:00 p.m. (EST) to run its footage. Viewers were suddenly transported from the Nuremberg Trials of 1948 to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. Introduced by Frank Reynolds, the segment had no narration and ran for fifteen minutes. “Unhuman,” the journalist George B. Leonard later called what he saw on television. “The bleeding, broken and unconscious passed across the screen, some of them limping alone, others supported on either side, still others carried in arms or on stretchers. It was at this point that my wife, sobbing, turned and walked away, saying, ‘I can’t look any more.’”¹⁴

Some who saw the horrific scenes in the midst of watching a film about Nazi atrocities now wondered if America suffered from its own native fascism. Father James Carroll had been a student in Germany in the 1930s, and the sound of Jim Clark’s voice saying, “Get those God-damned Niggers,” took him back to that earlier time. “I remembered my apartment in Berlin, the Jewish family with whom I lived, the steel that was to be used to bar the front door when ‘they’ came; the bottle of cyanide in the medicine cabinet—everybody knew why it was there,” he later told Leonard. “Could this be happening here?”¹⁵

Others who saw the pictures on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times the next day had similar reactions: horror, shame, and an overwhelming desire to do something about the atrocities taking place in the Deep South. Leonard spoke for many when he wrote, “I was not aware that at the same moment people . . . were feeling what my wife and I felt . . . [and] that [they] would drop whatever they were doing . . . leave home without changing clothes, borrow money, over-draw their checking accounts, board planes, buses, trains, cars, travel thousands of miles with no luggage . . . to place themselves alongside the Negroes they had watched on television.” They may not have known how widely their concern was shared, but many Americans did indeed drop everything and rush southward to help.

Over the next several days thousands poured into Selma. Some came in response to telegrams King sent to America’s religious leaders, asking them to join him in “a ministers’ march to Montgomery” on Tuesday, March 9. “No American is without responsibility,” King wrote. “All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life. The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear the burden.” Many religious leaders responded. By Tuesday, March 9, more than 450 clergy, both black and white, had come to Selma—ministers, priests, nuns, and rabbis. For the first time in the history of the movement Catholics were well represented. Heretofore their bishops had prohibited them from participating in civil rights marches. Now, however, that ban was lifted in many places. Later more volunteers would come from everywhere and from all walks of life: teachers, lawyers, labor leaders, college professors, homemakers, entertainers, laborers, civil rights activists bloodied in other southern states, and wives and children of Washington officialdom.16

Those who could not go south demonstrated in their own communities, from Maine to Hawaii. “Rarely has public opinion reacted so spontaneously and with such fury,” Time magazine observed. In Detroit, Mayor Jerome Cavenaugh and Governor George Romney led ten thousand people in a march demanding federal intervention to protect civil rights workers. Among them was a thirty-nine-year-old homemaker, mother of five, and part-time college student named Viola Liuzzo. The events of Bloody Sunday caused her to break down and cry. A few weeks later she left her family and classes at Wayne State University to go to Selma.

There were also demonstrations in eighty other cities, including Boston, Joliet, Ann Arbor, Kansas City, and San Diego. Four hundred people blocked the entrance and exits at the Los Angeles Federal Building and were arrested for obstructing justice. In Philadelphia college students mounted a sit-in at the Liberty Bell, while in Texas black ministers marched on the Alamo. Statements of support came from state legislatures, labor unions, universities, and chambers of commerce. “The mournful, determined tones of ‘We Shall Overcome’ rang out from Miami to Seattle,” noted the New York Times.17

Washington, DC, in particular became a center of protest. A dozen black activists led by Reverend Jefferson Rogers confronted Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in his office, demanding that US marshals be sent to Selma immediately. But Katzenbach refused. Rogers and his colleagues left, but a short time later three others arrived to sit in at Katzenbach’s office. Guards dragged them away as one shouted, “Freedom, buddy, Freedom!” Then twenty more appeared, sitting down outside the office door and refusing to leave. Katzenbach told them that their tactics would not affect him. At 10 p.m., after a struggle, US marshals finally picked up the demonstrators and removed them from the building. The president was outraged: “I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that they would get in the Justice Department building and have to be hauled out of there,” he told Bill Moyers. As long as he was president such people “were going to respect the law.” But still they kept coming.¹⁸

Demonstrators also picketed the White House day and night, marching, praying, and singing. Their presence annoyed the president, who complained about the noise: “Those god damned niggers have kept my daughters awake every night with their screaming and hollering,” Johnson later remarked privately. Telegrams poured into the White House, asking about his promised voting rights act. It would be coming “soon,” the president’s spokesmen said. This tepid response angered journalists across the political spectrum. Life magazine, whose publisher was a longtime Republican, thought the president’s statement “had almost no impact.” Two liberal journalists, who had covered the Selma crisis for Ramparts magazine, commented that “People were horrified. They were grieved. They were angry. They sought a catharsis. They looked to the White House—but they found nothing. No call for a day of contrition and mourning, no statement of outrage, no personal presence in Selma, no symbolic arrest of Sheriff Clark or Colonel Lingo. Nothing but an announcement that there would be a new voting rights act as soon as the lawyers could finish drafting it. Wait calmly, please.” The president seemed frustrated and sometimes downright odd. Roger Wilkins, a young black member of the Community Relations Service, visited the White House one day and unexpectedly ran into the president. Johnson knew him well—Roger was the nephew of the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins—but now the president barely recognized him. “It was really frightening,” Wilkins later recalled. “I said, ‘Hello, Mr. President.’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘These demonstrations, what are they all about?’ And I said, ‘People really want to vote, Mr. President. We really need a voting rights act.” The president growled at him. “No words came out, just Rrrr.”19

WHILE JOHNSON STRUGGLED TO NAVIGATE THE FALLOUT FROM SELMA, HIS staff continued to draft a voting rights bill. Justice Department lawyers, well aware of the imperfections in the earlier bills affecting voting rights, had concluded by March 1 that only a new law enforced by the federal government would suffice. The president agreed. Initially, there was little enthusiasm for it among Johnson’s top advisers, who feared that the bill was, as aide Horace Busby noted, “a return to Reconstruction . . . a most radical intervention Federally in this long inviolable domain of the states.” Katzenbach also shared Busby’s reservations. But the continuing violence in Selma, climaxing with Bloody Sunday, left Johnson and his advisers little choice. A draft of the bill had been completed on March 1, six days before the incident on Edmund Pettus Bridge, but they would continue to tinker with it for several weeks.

Johnson was hopeful that he had the votes in both the House and the Senate, but he feared that a southern filibuster might dilute or even defeat the bill. To prevent a filibuster, two-thirds of the Senate would have to approve cloture, a measure that would cut short debate on the bill and force a vote, and getting two-thirds of the Senate behind cloture would require Republican votes. So Johnson turned to his old colleague and sometime antagonist, Illinois senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Republican minority leader, for help.²⁰

At first glance they seemed polar opposites. Dirksen, sixty-nine, was a Midwest conservative in love with his own voice, a throwback to the Senate’s golden age, when the eloquence of a statesman like Daniel Webster could unify the nation. To preserve his voice, Dirksen daily gargled and swallowed a mixture of Ponds Cold Cream and warm water. His melodious baritone led colleagues to call him “the Wizard of Ooze.” His image and political style stood in stark contrast to that of Johnson, the southern populist who preferred working behind the scenes to bend men to his will. But at heart each was a pragmatist, “two brother artisans in government,” Lady Bird Johnson once called them. “I feel a kinship for him,” Johnson said of Dirksen. “We’ve had lots of battles, mostly on opposite sides of the aisle, but he always comes to the top.”21

Dirksen had come to the top in 1964 when he eventually supported the Civil Rights Bill and corralled enough Republicans to invoke cloture, thereby ending the long southern filibuster. In order to bring Dirksen over to his side, Johnson had instructed Senator Hubert Humphrey, the bill’s manager, to court Dirksen intensely. “You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen,” Johnson had ordered. “And don’t forget that Dirksen loves to bend at the elbow. . . . [D]rink with him till he agrees to vote for cloture and delivers me two Republicans from the mountain states.” Johnson had also wooed the Illinois senator himself during the debate over the Civil Rights Bill. “Dirksen, you come with me on this bill,” Johnson told him, “and two hundred years from now school children will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.” Dirksen had eventually agreed, but in addition to winning a place in history, he extracted from Johnson public works programs for his state and the appointments of his favorite candidates to administration posts. But despite its cost, his support had been invaluable. Now in 1965, Johnson hoped the Wizard would be with him again.²²

Initially, the senator was reluctant to support a Voting Rights Bill, coming as it did so soon after the earlier Act. But Bloody Sunday enraged him. Now, he told associates, he was willing to accept “revolutionary” legislation. He even began to work privately with administration officials to fine-tune the bill, and the final version was written in S-230, Dirksen’s ornate conference room dominated by a magnificent chandelier that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Circulating air caused its pendants to strike one another, providing a musical accompaniment to the men’s labors. Dirksen always sat at the head of the room’s large mahogany table next to Attorney General Katzenbach, leaving no doubt as to who was in charge and annoying Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who complained that he was being ignored. Later some would call the legislation the “Dirksenbach bill.”²³

At the president’s insistence, the draft under consideration reflected King’s demands as well as many of the other reforms civil rights groups had long recommended. It was radically different from earlier congressional efforts. The 1957 Civil Rights Act, besides creating the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and a Civil Rights Commission with the power to investigate abuses, had authorized the attorney general to prosecute those, particularly in the South, who violated a citizen’s right to register or vote in a federal election. But those charged in criminal cases could rely on local white juries to find them innocent. Hardly any progress was made; only four lawsuits were filed in the two years following the Act’s passage. The 1960 Act had scarcely done better. Ultimate control over elections still remained in the hands of local judges. In theory these judges could help to enforce the spirit of the law; they could register voters themselves or appoint referees to examine voter applications and approve them if applicants were found to be as qualified as white voters. But with so many racially biased judges in the South, neither was likely to happen. Accordingly, southern senators had called the bill “a victory for the South,” while the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall complained that “it would take two or three years for a good lawyer to get someone registered under this bill.” And like the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, the historic 1964 Act—though a breakthrough in terms of securing black Americans’ access to public accommodations—did little to provide access to the ballot box. A sixth-grade education could now be offered as proof of literacy, and registrars were prohibited from disqualifying applicants who made minor mistakes on their registration forms, but other forms of discrimination persisted.24

The 1965 bill gave the government new and extraordinary power over voting procedures, shifting responsibility from the courts to the executive branch. Justice Department lawyers, bruised from their battles in the South, adopted a “triggering” formula whereby literacy and other tests that prevented registration would be eliminated in those states where less than 50 percent of the voting-age population had registered or voted in the 1964 presidential election. If the attorney general received at least twenty complaints from disenfranchised citizens or if he determined in some other manner that voting had been obstructed, he was authorized to dispatch federal registrars to solve the problems. And all elections—local, state, and federal—would be covered. To prevent southern states from adopting voting procedures to circumvent the new law, a “preclearance” provision prevented them from making changes without first submitting them to the Justice Department or a Washington, DC, court. States immediately affected were Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and parts of North Carolina.

But the version of the bill the Justice Department had drafted still had significant flaws. Not covered were Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, all of which had no literacy tests but exhibited discrimination, whereas the bill would also target four states with low African American populations and correspondingly low rates of black registration—Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, and Maine—despite having little or no demonstrable discrimination toward black voters. Along with the solicitor general, who still feared that the bill was unconstitutional, Justice Department lawyers continued to work on other versions up until the moment Dirksen and the committee in room S-230 became involved.25

Although Dirksen had agreed to cooperate with Johnson to pass a voting rights bill, this did not mean that he would automatically approve the administration’s draft. He thought it was too long and complicated; one estimate put it at forty pages. “We went laboriously through every line,” recalled Assistant Attorney General Stephen Pollak, who took part in the proceedings. Dirksen and his chief aide, Neil Kennedy, closely reviewed each provision but accepted them if Pollak and his colleagues could make a case for them, as invariably they did. Pollak did find it annoying that “Dirksen’s bombers,” as the Democrats called the senator’s lawyers, sought mostly cosmetic changes that delayed final agreement. Katzenbach thought Dirksen enjoyed “demonstrating his power. . . . It was something of an ego trip.”²⁶

But Dirksen was genuinely concerned that the federal government would play too great a role in administering the new voting program. He preferred that federal judges appoint the registrars and enforce registration and voting while leaving enforcement of the law to judges within each state. Mansfield and Katzenbach disagreed. For them, southern senators, nearly all of them segregationists, played the central role in selecting those who became judges, so the latter could not be trusted to administer the law fairly. Dirksen was also troubled that the new law would primarily affect seven southern states, a fact that itself could be construed as a form of discrimination. Katzenbach, however, disagreed, and for good reason. “Because of [those states’] past history, we have the right to put this restriction on them,” he insisted. But he did appreciate that the title “Registrar” might be inflammatory and instead agreed to call them “Examiners.” A more important concession allowed a federal court in Washington, DC, to exempt a state from the bill if the court found that it had not discriminated against blacks during the past ten years. That addition to the bill would prevent the law from unfairly targeting states like Alaska or Maine, where voting rights were not such a problem as to have warranted federal intervention.²⁷

The workday usually ended around five o’clock, but Katzenbach and his aides were not allowed to escape until they had spent some time in the “Twilight Lodge,” that part of Dirksen’s office that contained a fully stocked bar. Dirksen did not consider this frivolous; for him it was an important part of the legislative process. “It generates a fellowship you can’t generate in any other way,” he stated. Occasionally even Lyndon Johnson dropped in asking for a root beer but was happy to accept a scotch and soda. Johnson probably enjoyed the drink and comradeship, but the Wizard of Ooze was working his magic too slowly to please him. As Johnson had told Katzenbach months before, he needed a bill that was constitutional and effective, and he needed it soon.28

MARTIN LUTHER KING RETURNED TO SELMA ON MARCH 8, THE DAY AFTER Bloody Sunday, to find that he faced a new crisis. His lawyers informed him that Judge Frank Mims Johnson Jr., the federal district judge for the Middle District of Alabama, wanted him to postpone the forthcoming march. Johnson planned to hold hearings later that week before deciding whether to grant King’s request to issue an injunction that would prohibit Alabama authorities from interfering with another march to Montgomery. The federal courts (outside the South) had been good to the civil rights movement, certainly better than Congress or the presidents, regardless of party. King had never defied a federal court and was agonized at the thought of doing so now. Such an act would also alienate the Johnson administration, which was hard at work preparing a voting rights bill. But King had called for a march, and the people responded. Could he now call it off and still retain leadership of the movement? He had not been present on Bloody Sunday; was he to hide again? How could he restrain his own people who wanted an immediate march—SNCC activists, the Marion veterans who were beaten on Sunday, and the hundreds of new allies who were still arriving in Selma? They could easily march without him and again face the wrath of Jim Clark and the state troopers.

Later, at the home of the dentist Sullivan Jackson (a place Jim Bevel called the “Crisis Center”), King’s lieutenants provided no help in resolving his conflicts. Hosea Williams, who had led Sunday’s march, wanted to go forward. They owed it, he said, to those whose limbs had been broken and throats burned the day before. CORE’s James Farmer sympathized but recommended that they wait. SNCC’s James Forman wanted to march. King had learned from Democratic Party chairman Louis Martin that Lyndon Johnson wanted him to postpone the march. King was willing, he told Martin, if the president sent a prominent official to act as a mediator, a step that might buy him some time. King’s lawyers recommended caution: give the judge time to decide, they counseled. As King hurried to a midnight rally, he agreed.29

Perhaps it was the size of the crowd that filled Brown Chapel—more than one thousand, the veterans of the day before now augmented by distinguished clergymen and other volunteers who had just arrived from thirty states—that led King to change his mind. “We’ve gone too far to turn back now,” he told them. “We must let them know that nothing can stop us—not even death itself. We must be ready for a season of suffering. The only way we can achieve freedom is to conquer the fear of death,” King concluded. “Man dies when he refuses to stand up for what is right, for what is just, for what is true.” Although King did not explicitly say it, his audience thought his decision was irrevocable. They would march again tomorrow, and this time he would lead them.³⁰

In fact, King was uncertain about leading the march, and later that night the Crisis Center again rang out with angry voices debating King’s options. He went to bed at 4:00 a.m., but the attorney general woke him at 5:00 to persuade King not to march. When Katzenbach complained that it was just a matter of time before Judge Johnson issued an order that, in all likelihood, would protect the marchers, King reminded him that he knew all about promises. “Mr. Attorney General,” he said, “you have not been a black man in America for three hundred years.” There was nothing Katzenbach could say to that.

Developments in Selma were also driving a wedge between King and the White House. Johnson felt another march would be disastrous, and he was furious that King was even considering violating Judge Johnson’s order. “Listen,” he told Bill Moyers, late on the night of March 8, “[King] better go to behaving himself, or all of them are going to get put in jail. I think that we really ought to be firm on it. . . . I just think it’s outrageous what’s on TV. I’ve been watching it here, and it looks like that man’s in charge of the country and taking it over. I just don’t think we can afford to have that kind of character running [around]. I’d . . . take a very firm line with him.” Stopping what Johnson called that “goddamn march” became the president’s top priority, as King would soon learn.³¹

Early the next morning, on the day of the planned march, two visitors arrived to see King: John Doar, assistant attorney general for civil rights, and LeRoy Collins, a former governor of Florida and now the director of the new Community Relations Service tasked with mediating such crises. President Johnson personally sent Collins to persuade King to call off the march. King hurried from his bedroom still wearing the burgundy pajamas he borrowed from Sullivan Jackson. He was followed by his staff, who had slept everywhere in the house, including the family bathtub. Doar was upset that King had reversed himself; the attorney general, the president, and, most importantly, Judge Johnson believed that he’d agreed not to march. King replied that a nonviolent march to request a redress of grievances was a thoroughly American act, absolutely constitutional. Collins and Doar feared a repetition of Bloody Sunday. In response, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, leader of the movement in Birmingham, told the federal men that they should confer with those who had ordered the attack on Bloody Sunday, Sheriff Clark and Wallace’s director of public safety, Al Lingo. King would not be moved. Even if he called off the march, he felt his angry supporters would go ahead anyway.

Finally Collins suggested a compromise: King and his company would march until they reached the spot of the recent assault, acknowledge Bloody Sunday through prayer, then turn around and return to the church. Clark and Lingo were not known for restraint, King countered. Collins asked whether, if he could get such an assurance from the Alabamians, King would accept his proposal. “I cannot agree to do anything because I don’t know what I can get my people to do,” King replied, “but if you will get Sheriff Clark and Lingo to agree to something like that, I will try.” As Collins and Doar departed, King received final confirmation of the news he feared the most: Judge Johnson had issued an injunction prohibiting the march and ordered King to appear Thursday at a hearing to consider his petition to block state interference. That led to another round of conference calls with New York lawyers, all of which settled nothing.32

The day began hopefully after King’s uplifting remarks at the midnight rally, but it would end disastrously, especially for King himself. Many thought it was his worst moment as a leader. He arrived at Brown Chapel at 2:30 p.m. to find a crowd of about fifteen hundred assembling in the playground adjacent to the chapel. “The doctor’s arrived! The doctor’s arrived!” one excited woman yelled as he entered the church. The marchers waited impatiently, some relishing another confrontation with Clark and Lingo’s forces. Many sang, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’round, I’m gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’, marching up to freedom land.” Black construction workers wore hard hats. “I ain’t going to get bopped this time!” one said. “We were waiting for the shit to get on,” another young man later recalled. “We were ready for the rumble.” Jim Bevel, dressed as usual in blue overalls and skullcap, tried to calm them down. “Any man who has the urge to hit a posse man or a state trooper with a pop bottle is a fool,” he told them. “That is just what they want you to do. Then they can call you a mob and beat you to death.”33

At around 3 p.m. King addressed the crowd. “We have the right to walk the highways, and we have the right to walk to Montgomery if our feet will get us there,” he said. “I have no alternative but to lead a march from this spot to carry our grievances to the seat of government. I have to march.” Cheers and applause rang out. “I do not know what lies ahead of us. There may be beatings, jailing, tear gas. But I would rather die on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience! There is nothing more tragic in all this world than to know right and not to do it.” As the nearly thousand people—almost four times greater than Sunday’s group—began to ready themselves, LeRoy Collins forced his way through the crowd and handed King a map. “If you follow this,” Collins said, “I think everything will be all right.” Although Clark and Lingo were receptive to Collins’s plan, King was skeptical. He asked whether Collins thought that Clark and Lingo would really abide by such an arrangement. Collins promised to personally seize the first trooper who advanced.³⁴

And so they set out. King was in the lead, flanked by John Wesley Lord, Methodist bishop of Washington, DC, and Dr. Harold Schoemer of the Chicago Theological Seminary along with King’s colleagues Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, CORE’s James Farmer, and SNCC’s James Forman. The line behind them stretched for a mile—rich young women wearing polo coats followed by bearded poets, senators’ wives and widows, and ordinary folks, both black and white. Walking through the white business district, one angry young man yelled at King, “You son of a bitch—you want to vote, why don’t you act like a human being?” King ignored him. Suddenly a car approached and its door flew open, but it was only Governor Collins with some good news. He thought they definitely had a deal: Clark and Lingo would not attack if King followed the map’s route precisely. “I’ll do my best,” King told him, fearful that he might not be able to control his own followers and they might refuse to turn around. Collins departed.35

Nearing the bridge they were halted by Stanley Fountain, chief deputy marshal of the Southern District of Alabama, who read Judge Johnson’s long legal order without missing a beat. “I am aware of the order,” King replied, then he led the crowd onward, perhaps wondering if he was now in contempt of court and thinking too about Collins’s last hurried remarks. There was no way that King could be sure whether he could rely on a promise made by Clark or Lingo’s boss, George Wallace. This could easily be a trick, and another bloodbath might be awaiting them at the bridge. King would know shortly.

Just ahead was what John Lewis and Hosea Williams first saw two days earlier: state troopers backed up by Jim Clark’s posse men. (In fact, it was now an even stronger force. One hundred fifty carloads of troopers, five hundred in all, had been added to the existing force. Nearly every member of Al Lingo’s corps was on the bridge.) Then Major John Cloud and his bullhorn appeared, and veterans of Bloody Sunday momentarily relived the event. “You are ordered to stop and stand where you are,” he said, his voice echoing over the crowd. “This march will not continue.”

“We have a right to march,” King countered.

“This march will not continue,” Cloud repeated. “It is not conducive to the safety of this group or to the motoring public.” Behind Cloud stood the troopers, grim faced, with their nightsticks at the ready.

King asked for a moment to pray. “You can have your prayer,” Cloud said, “and then you must return to your church.” As King and his followers knelt, Ralph Abernathy spoke. “We come to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. We don’t have much to offer, but we do have our bodies, and we lay them on the altar today.” While they prayed, a trooper raised his nightstick and, pointing it at a minister near King, said, “He’s mine.”

But the attack never came. As King and the others rose, Major Cloud suddenly called out, “Troopers, withdraw. Clear the road completely—move out.” The blue wall opened, leaving King in an excruciating position. They could now cross the bridge and proceed to Montgomery fifty miles ahead. Or they could turn around, an act that would (as Wallace wished) embarrass and perhaps destroy King’s leadership of the movement but would hopefully not violate Judge Johnson’s order while also giving the marchers more time to prepare for the long trek to the capital.

Without hesitating, King whirled around and announced, “We will go back to the church now.” And the great mass began to turn around, some happy but many more confused, disappointed, and furious at King.36

The Times’s Gay Talese interviewed the contented ones. “They had found the experience moving and inspiring and unforgettable,” he wrote. “It was a perfect day”—but not for everyone. Many demonstrators wondered if King had made a secret deal with Wallace and if their whole effort had been a charade. “We were mad, we were all ready to get our ass kicked that afternoon,” said Hardy Frye, a veteran of the Mississippi campaigns. “There were ministers, some Catholic priests, they were mad because they thought they were going to be martyrs for the cause that morning.” Unitarian minister Orloff Miller was confused, then upset: “What is going on?” he later recalled. “Are we not going to go through with this confrontation? . . . I felt just awful. . . . I had come to lay myself on the line just as much as people in Selma had . . . on Sunday.” But it was SNCC’s James Forman who spoke most harshly. “Turn-Around Tuesday,” as the event became known, was “a classic example of trickery against the people,” he said.³⁷

Back at Brown Chapel King faced his critics, who thought his behavior shameful. “We did march and we did reach the point of the brutality and we had a prayer service and a freedom rally,” King explained. “And we will go to Montgomery next week in numbers that no man can number.” Few were convinced. Willie Ricks, an early advocate of “Black Power,” questioned King’s courage, producing a rare public outburst. “I’m in charge here and I intend to remain in charge,” King yelled. “You are not Martin Luther King! I’m Martin Luther King. No matter what you do, you’ll never be Martin Luther King.” As soon as he could, King left for Montgomery, where he found a temporary refuge from his enemies.³⁸

One of the great ironies of Martin Luther King’s career was that when he found himself in crisis, acts of violence would rescue him. When the movement stalled in Birmingham in 1963, Bull Connor’s police dogs revived it. When the press began losing interest in voter registration in Selma, Jim Clark beat Annie Cooper, and the story was again front-page news. Now, when King seemed about to lose control of his people, another tragedy occurred to draw attention away from his troubles. Among those who came to Selma after Bloody Sunday were James Reeb, Clark Olsen, and Orloff Miller, all Unitarian ministers. After listening to King’s apologia Tuesday night, they decided to go to dinner, and having been warned that white restaurants would not be hospitable, they dined at Walker’s, not far from SCLC headquarters and Amelia Boynton’s insurance office. They found the café crowded with other ministers, journalists, and black workers dining on pigs’ feet, sausage, collard greens, and fried chicken while the jukebox blared Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

After an enjoyable meal, the three ministers set out for Mrs. Boynton’s office two blocks away, taking a shortcut that accidentally took them into hostile territory. Suddenly, four white men dressed in casual clothes ran toward them, yelling, “Hey you niggers, hey you niggers!” “Oh, oh, here’s trouble,” Olsen remarked, and the three hurried away. But the men were faster, and Olsen, looking over his shoulder, saw one, his face twisted in hate, swing a long club that caught Jim Reeb on the left side of his head. “Here’s how it feels to be a nigger down here,” Reeb’s attacker screamed. The men kicked and punched Olsen and Miller and then fled, leaving the three ministers lying in the street.39

Miller yelled for help but nobody came. He and Olsen were able to get Reeb to his feet, but his injury was serious; he was incoherent and complaining of terrible pain. They were able to get him to Mrs. Boynton’s office, where Diane Nash quickly arranged for an ambulance to take Reeb and the others to the Burwell Infirmary, a small hospital that treated blacks and their white allies. Dr. William Dinkins, who had cared for Jimmie Lee Jackson a few weeks earlier, examined Reeb, who was becoming agitated, and decided that he needed to go to Birmingham Hospital. Calls were made to obtain another ambulance, and the ministers learned that the hospital required a $150 deposit before they would admit Reeb, so Miller rushed back to the Boynton office, where Nash gave him a check to cover that expense. The ambulance arrived, picked up the unconscious Reeb and his two fellow ministers, and set out for Birmingham, one hundred miles away.

Ten minutes into their trip the ambulance blew a tire. The driver, afraid to stop, drove on, the ambulance bouncing on three tires and a metal rim. Eventually they stopped at a radio station and called for another ambulance. Just as Reeb was transferred to the new ambulance, however, Dallas County deputies pulled up, blocking the vehicle’s exit. Precious time was lost as the officers interrogated the ministers and refused their request to escort them to Birmingham. After they departed, the ambulance took off, reaching speeds at more than eighty miles an hour. But it did not arrive at the Birmingham Hospital until 11:00 p.m., nearly four hours after the assault. The doctors found that Reeb had sustained multiple skull fractures, and they rushed him into surgery for a seventy-minute operation. The prognosis was grave.40

Coming less than a week after Bloody Sunday, the attack on a thirty-eight-year-old Boston minister and father of four brought even more Americans to Selma for what King promised would be the final—and successful—march to Montgomery. Rallies in Washington and around the country continued, and more people denounced the president’s inaction. Johnson sent Mrs. Reeb a bouquet of yellow roses, prompting one activist to remark, “Flowers instead of marshals, that’s what they give us. That’s really big of him.”⁴¹

King’s seclusion ended on Thursday, March 11, when he appeared in Judge Johnson’s Montgomery courtroom for the injunction hearings that King hoped would pave the way for a march to Montgomery. At forty-seven, the judge was already a southern legend, hated by segregationists (George Wallace called him “a low-down, carpetbaggin’, scalawaggin’, race-mixin’ liar”) and admired by civil rights workers—not because he was their advocate, for he was not, but rather because they knew they would receive a fair hearing in his courtroom. King had the utmost respect for Johnson, and although visibly nervous, he hoped for a positive outcome from the hearings.

W. McLean Pitts, Jim Clark’s lawyer, attacked immediately, asking Judge Johnson to find King in contempt for violating his ban against marching. Johnson sharply rejected his motion. When Pitts insulted King and other black witnesses on cross-examination, Johnson proclaimed that everyone in his court would be treated courteously. “I’m trying very hard,” Pitts stuttered. “Try a little harder,” the judge shot back.

But Johnson also examined King closely about his decision to turn the march around on Tuesday. This forced King to admit that Governor Collins had brokered a deal between him and the Alabamians and that he never intended to begin a march to Montgomery that day. “I was disturbed,” King testified. “Thousands of people who had come to Selma to march were deeply aroused by the brutality of Sunday. I felt if I had not done it, pent-up emotions could have developed into an uncontrollable situation. I did it to give them an outlet.” He had made a difficult choice but one that was consistent with his belief in nonviolence. Although King’s lawyers hoped that would be enough to save King from a contempt citation, it was also sure to enlarge the growing gulf between him and SNCC’s young followers. Indeed, some of them told reporters privately that they felt King had betrayed the movement. Further, SNCC leader Jim Forman, demonstrating what the New York Times called “open contempt” for King, on Wednesday had moved his followers into Montgomery, where demonstrations led to violent confrontations with police and state troopers. And more days of hearings lay ahead before the judge made a final decision.42

That Thursday was also a hard day for President Johnson. In the president’s quarters he could hear the sounds of picketers—hundreds of them, he later learned, marching along Pennsylvania Avenue, some chanting, “Freedom Now,” others singing, “We Shall Overcome,” and many bearing signs that read, “Go All The Way, LBJ.” A few hours later they blocked traffic by lying down in the street.⁴³

More trouble followed later that day. A group of twelve young people (ten females, two males) joined a White House tour at 11:00 a.m., and as they strolled along the main first floor corridor they suddenly stopped and sat down. They declared their intentions by singing, “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Professor Eric Goldman, Johnson’s presidential historian, thought them a disorderly, disheveled bunch. “They sprawled across the floor, shouted songs interspersed with crude insults directed at the President, demanded that he speak to them, and that he speak ‘right,’” Goldman later wrote. As Goldman passed them, one young woman yelled, “Where you going, fink bastard—going to get him his bullwhip?”⁴⁴

The sit-in came at the worst possible time. That evening Johnson planned to brief eighty congressmen and senators on civil rights and Vietnam, then join them and their wives at a reception in the State Dining Room. So the young demonstrators had to be removed as quickly as possible. When his aide Lee White suggested that the group be arrested and forcibly removed, Johnson chose a more clever approach. “Let them eat and drink, but don’t let them go to the bathroom,” he ordered. So with Mrs. Johnson’s help, the group received cup after cup of coffee, and sure enough, after a few minutes two left hurriedly, never to return. Ten remained. The president ordered that the group be totally isolated in their nest in the East Wing’s corridor. White House police placed screens around them, passersby avoided them, and reporters were not allowed to interview them. At 3:30 Johnson sent Lee White, Clifford Alexander, and Press Secretary Bill Moyers to meet with them to see if it was safe for Johnson to talk with them. “We want to see the President!” cried one stocky young man, but his colleagues, fearing the president’s well-known temper, shouted him down. Moyers asked, “How would you like it if someone came into your house and refused to move?” and the dialogue quickly deteriorated. When the president learned of the exchange, he became “snappish,” according to one aide: “I send three of the supposed smartest guys in the world on a simple assignment,” Johnson barked, “and they can’t even get some kids to talk to me.”45

Finally tiring of this annoyance, Johnson developed the plan that brought an end to the six-hour-long sit-in. While he attended the dedication of a new gymnasium on Capitol Hill at 6:00, two plain-clothes police officers, one white, one black, dragged off just two demonstrators, placing them in an unmarked car and driving them away. A few minutes later a second team of officers removed two more and so on until the hall was cleared. All the demonstrators ended up at different police stations throughout the city where, eventually, they were freed without an arraignment or posting bond.⁴⁶

The protestors were gone, but the attacks on Johnson continued. Now, however, they came from the senators and representatives who, like his earlier visitors, showed little respect for the president. “Where is your bill? . . .” asked an angry New Hampshire Republican. “Why has it taken four months?” The president immediately jumped to his feet, “obviously stung,” recalled one who was present. With equal heat, Johnson replied that there were complicated obstacles to overcome. They had labored long to create a bill with nearly impossible features: it must be constitutional, able to pass quickly through Congress, and emerge in a form strong enough to register all eligible voters—not an easy task. Mississippi congressman John Bell Williams and his colleague Glenn Andrews, whose district included Selma, blamed the president for not controlling King who, Andrews said, was responsible for the violence that had wracked his city. Johnson asked them to consider the causes that produced the crisis—denying blacks the right to vote. Then, presidential aide Marvin Watson entered the room and handed the president a note. It contained the grim news he had expected: Reverend James Reeb had died. Johnson excused himself, and he and Mrs. Johnson telephoned their condolences to Mrs. Reeb and the minister’s father. It was “a helpless and painful talk,” Lady Bird Johnson thought, one that lasted fifteen minutes. Later the president dispatched an Air Force C-140 jet to Birmingham to fly Mrs. Reeb and her father-in-law home to Boston.

Before retiring for the night the First Lady tape-recorded her thoughts on that evening’s events: “When we went upstairs we could hear the Congressional guests and the music still playing below; and out in front the chanting of the civil rights marchers. What a house. What a life.”47

With Reeb’s death, the fires of protest in Selma and around the country flamed anew. “Reverend Reeb now joins the ranks of those martyred heroes who have died in the struggle for freedom and human dignity,” Dr. King said. He was “murdered by an atmosphere of inhumanity in Alabama that tolerated the vicious murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson . . . and the brutal beating of Sunday in Selma.” To undermine King’s eulogy, Sheriff Clark issued his own statement, in which he described Jackson as having “died under very mysterious circumstances,” whereas Reeb’s mortal injuries were the result of a barroom fight. Police Chief Wilson Baker announced the arrest of four suspects, but despite the seriousness of the alleged crime, all were quickly freed after posting an unusually modest bail. Demonstrations increased, and those who were holding an around-the-clock prayer vigil in a chilly rain were pelted with rocks and bottles by angry whites. Snipers, perched further away, fired their rifles at the group, slightly injuring four, including a teenage girl who suffered a split lip and the loss of a tooth.⁴⁸

In Washington, DC, three thousand clergymen from throughout the United States—priests, ministers, and rabbis—gathered to attend an interfaith rally called by the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race. On Friday morning, March 12, they filled a church on East Capitol Street to overflowing, where they listened to their colleagues report on the violence they had observed in Selma, violence that had now claimed the life of a fellow cleric. The speakers called on President Johnson to send a voting rights bill to Congress and provide protection for civil rights workers in Alabama. “I know that President Johnson is a deeply concerned and troubled man,” said Methodist bishop John Wesley Lord, who had marched with King on Turn-Around Tuesday. “But I also believe, that due to the inability of the President to act . . . many Negroes and whites have become disenchanted and are in deep despair.” Lord called on the president to visit Selma, an act that “would do much to restore lost confidence and increase hope in the future.” When the session ended around noon, hundreds marched to the capitol to confer with their representatives and senators.⁴⁹

Johnson faced his critics head-on that morning. They came first from a local civil rights group, led by the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, the Washington, DC, director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which met with the president for two hours in the Cabinet Room. Besides clergymen, members of SNCC, CORE, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—veteran activists who had seen their colleagues beaten and killed throughout the South—were also in attendance. They were in no mood for presidential bromides. “Why has it taken so long for you to send a voting rights bill to the Congress?” asked an angry Paul Moore Jr., the liberal Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC. “Two reasons,” Johnson replied. “First, it’s got to pass. We can’t risk defeat or dilution by filibuster on this one. This bill has to go up there clean, simple, and powerful. Second, we don’t want this bill declared unconstitutional. This can’t be just a two-line bill. . . . The wherefores and the therefores are insurance against that.”

Others wanted to know why he refused to send troops or even US Marshals to protect the beleaguered activists in Selma. Johnson explained the difficulties involved but did admit that he had placed seven hundred federal troops on alert and would have moved them quickly to the Edmund Pettus Bridge if Tuesday’s agreement had broken down. Johnson was reluctant to use force, believing that it would drive southern moderates into George Wallace’s camp. He informed the activists that the Justice Department had filed an amicus brief supporting King’s request that Judge Johnson prohibit Alabama forces from attacking another march, and the president stressed the importance of waiting for the judge’s decision. If Wallace failed to protect the marchers and violence again erupted, Johnson would then send in troops.

Never one to respond well to threats or pressure, Johnson attacked the demonstrators outside who, he said, had disturbed his family’s sleep. Such acts would not affect him, he insisted. He would not be “blackjacked” into hasty action, whether it was sending troops to Selma or sending a voting rights bill to Congress.

“I don’t think anyone is interested in whether your daughters could sleep or not,” said a brazen young SNCC activist named Hubert Brown. “We are interested in the lives of our people. Which side is the federal government on?” This would not be the last time that Brown, who his friends called “Rap,” made statements designed to enflame those in power. Within two years he would become one of the foremost advocates of Black Power, proclaiming, “If America doesn’t come around, then black people are going to burn it down.”

Brown’s remarks on this day must have shocked the president, because suddenly a different Lyndon Johnson appeared, one whose powerful soliloquy about the importance of the black struggle held his listeners spellbound for an hour. Speaker of the House John McCormack, also present, remarked, “Good Lord, Mr. President, why don’t you say that to the people? I think you should come up to the Congress and say it there.”

“At the right time, I will, Mr. Speaker,” he said. “At the right time.”

The group departed at 12:10 p.m., no doubt confused by the president’s erratic behavior.50

Johnson skipped lunch, and five minutes later he met the delegation from the National Council of Churches. Sensing tension, he tried to diffuse it by joking that the demonstrators outside were so noisy that they were “violatin’ my civil rights.” Nobody found this amusing, so Johnson tried to win them over by recounting his achievements in civil rights. When that failed to win them over, Johnson likened himself to a tormented Abraham Lincoln, whose ghost, he said, was “moving up and down the corridors of the [White House],” adding for good measure, “I am a greatly anguished man.” He promised that the bill would be forthcoming in a matter of days. But he had said that so often that the group departed unconvinced of his sincerity. One participant later called Johnson’s remarks “a snow job.”⁵¹

When Johnson returned to his office later that afternoon he learned that telegrams had been pouring in to the White House, each demanding a voting rights bill. Fifty people telephoned Johnson, expressing their anger about what had happened to Reverend Reeb. (No one called him when Jimmie Lee Jackson died.) New reports noted that student protestors had been especially active that day: in Berkeley, California, they had dived into a pool that reflected the towering federal building behind it, while students from Harvard, Brandeis, Radcliffe, and MIT had staged a sit-in at Boston’s federal building and forced police to drag them away.⁵²

Those who observed the president most closely thought the continuing crisis was physically and emotionally exhausting him. Mrs. Johnson worried most of all: “There is this heavy load of tension and this fog of depression,” she noted in her diary at the time. What the president needed was “exercise, diet, and a break—to get off to sunshine and rest for a couple of days. . . . But Lyndon feels chained right here, and it’s having a corrosive effect on his personality.” There was no escaping that fog or the frustrations and uncertainties he was experiencing. Just four months earlier he had won the presidency with 60 percent of the popular vote, the greatest landslide in history. Now he seemed to be at odds with everyone: civil rights workers and religious leaders attacked him to his face, southerners hated him, and, most seriously, he felt he was losing control of Congress. “Is Dirksen planning to pull out on us?” Johnson had asked Katzenbach earlier that week. The attorney general assured the president that the Illinois senator was still on board. But Johnson remained nervous: Forty-three members of the House and seven senators—Republicans and Democrats alike—had urged him to submit a bill immediately. Powerful members of the Senate and the House disliked the Justice Department’s draft and privately threatened to submit their own versions of the bill. Although Katzenbach and the others were still working on the bill—tightening words here, providing more detail there—by that Friday afternoon he had decided to submit the bill within the next few days, however imperfect it still might be.53

Then came a telegram from Governor Wallace requesting a meeting with the president to discuss the Alabama crisis. Johnson was not surprised: Wallace had leaked news of his request to the press before Johnson actually received the message. And the president had been trying for several days to reach the governor to see if they could talk about avoiding another catastrophe. But his southern contacts were discouraging. Buford Ellington, a former Tennessee governor now serving as director of the Office of Emergency Planning, warned Johnson that “you can’t trust [Wallace]. I can talk to him anytime, but there’s an element of danger there.” Alabama senator Lister Hill agreed with Ellington’s assessment of the governor: “That damned little Wallace,” he told Johnson. “The trouble is he just wants people to say, ‘Oh, God, he died for the cause—he stayed back for the bitter end.’” But Johnson did receive the impression, as he told Hill, that the governor “wants a way out because this is getting pretty bad from their standpoint.” With this in mind, Johnson quickly responded to the telegram and invited Wallace to come to the White House on Saturday, March 13.⁵⁴

What ensued was “the most amazing conversation I’ve ever been present at,” Nicholas Katzenbach later recalled, and at three hours and seventeen minutes, it was surely one of the longest. Johnson invited Wallace and Seymore Trammel, Wallace’s closest aide, into the Oval Office, directing the bantam-weight governor to take a seat on a spongy couch into which he sank, reducing his already tiny stature by a foot. Pulling his rocking chair close by, the six-foot-four Johnson, though seated, still towered over the helpless Wallace. For a few minutes there was just pleasant banter. Johnson proudly introduced the governor to his dogs, Him, a tan beagle, and Blanco, a white collie who sniffed at the governor with canine curiosity. It might have been the high point of Wallace’s reception in the Oval Office.

“Well, Governor,” Johnson finally asked, “you wanted to see me?”

Wallace told the president that “malcontents, many of them trained in Moscow and New York,” were disrupting Alabama. It was Johnson’s responsibility to stop them.

The governor was wrong, Johnson replied. All the protestors sought was the right to vote. “You can’t stop a fever by putting an icepack on your head,” he said. “You’ve got to use antibiotics and get to the cause of the fever.”

“You cannot deal with street revolutionaries,” Wallace countered. “You can never satisfy them. First it is a front seat on the bus; next it’s a takeover of the parks; then it’s public schools; then it’s voting rights; then it’s jobs; then it’s distribution of wealth without work.”

Johnson looked at Wallace with a mixture of scorn and pity. “George, why are you doing this?” he asked. “You came into office a liberal—you spent all your life wanting to do things for the poor. . . . Why are you off on this black thing? You ought to be down there calling for help for Aunt Susie in the nursing home.”

Trammel tried to interrupt the president, to shift the conversation back to what he and his boss thought was the central issue—the Communist protestors who were tearing up Alabama—but Johnson refused to yield the floor.

“George,” Johnson said, “do you see all of those demonstrators out in front of the White House?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. President, I saw them,” Wallace replied.

“Wouldn’t it be just wonderful if we could put an end to all those demonstrations?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. President, that would be wonderful.”

“Well, why don’t you and I go out there, George . . . and let’s announce that you’ve decided to [let the blacks vote] . . . in Alabama. . . . Why don’t you let the niggers vote? You agree they got the right to vote, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, there’s no quarrel with that,” Wallace said.

“Well, then, why don’t you let them vote?” Johnson asked.

“I don’t have that power. That belongs to the country registrars in the state of Alabama.”

“George,” he said, “don’t you shit me as to who runs Alabama.”

Wallace continued to claim that he had no legal power over state registrars.

“Why don’t you persuade them, George?”

“I don’t think I could do that.”

“Now, don’t shit me . . . George Wallace.”

Looking Wallace straight in the eye, Johnson said, “George, you’re fucking over your president. Why are you fucking over your president?

“George, you and I shouldn’t be thinking about 1964,” Johnson continued. “We should be thinking about 1984. We’ll both be dead and gone then. Now, you’ve got a lot of poor people down there in Alabama, a lot of ignorant people. A lot of people need jobs. A lot of people need a future. You could do a lot for them.” Appealing to Wallace’s better nature, he said, “Now, in 1984, George, what do you want left behind? You want a great big marble monument that says, ‘George Wallace: He Built’, or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine laying there along that hot Caliches soil that says, ‘George Wallace: He Hated’?”55

The long conversation with Wallace had energized the president as it also reduced the governor to what one observer called “a mass of quivering flesh.” Before leaving the White House Wallace met with reporters, one of whom thought that he “looked considerably sobered and shorn of his accustomed cockiness.” Ignoring the questions they fired at him, he thanked the president, who he called “a great gentleman, as always,” for his hospitality. Then he departed, surrounded by Secret Service agents and police. Later Wallace confessed to an aide that Johnson had simply overwhelmed him. “Hell,” he said, “if I’d stayed in there much longer, he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.”⁵⁶

Later that afternoon Johnson met with more than one hundred reporters who had gathered in the Rose Garden for a special Saturday press conference. He was no longer the indecisive, hesitant leader who had met with the clergymen just a few days prior. Now Johnson was “forceful and in full command,” the New York Times’s Tom Wicker later wrote. Typically the president’s opening remarks at a news conference were brief and unremarkable. Not today. “This March week has brought a very deep and painful challenge to the unending search for American freedom,” the president said. “That challenge is not yet over but before it is ended every resource of this Government will be directed to insuring justice for all men of all races in Alabama and everywhere in this land.”

Those who had demonstrated peacefully in Selma on Sunday, March 7, were protesting “against a deep and very unjust flaw in American democracy itself,” the president insisted—the denial of the right to vote because of the color of their skin. They were then attacked in an event Johnson called an “American tragedy:” “The blows that were received, the blood that was shed . . . must strengthen the determination of each of us to bring full and equal and exact justice to all of our people.” Toward that end he surprised reporters by announcing that a new voting rights bill would be sent to Congress on Monday, March 15—just two days away. The new law “would strike down all restrictions used to deny the people the right to vote. . . . This is not just the policy of your Government, or your President,” Johnson said. “It is in the heart and the purpose and the meaning of America itself.” Never before had the president been so publicly supportive of the civil rights movement and the fight for voting rights.57

That evening the president and Mrs. Johnson attended a dinner party celebrating the appointment of a new American ambassador to Spain. Gone was the morose, anguished Johnson. “He was more in control of himself than I’ve ever seen,” said one guest. “It was as if he had climbed a high place and could see things better than anyone else and fit them together.” He had heard the painful pleas from the blacks of Selma and Marion but had waited. He withstood the attacks brought on by Reverend Reeb’s death and listened to angry clergymen and congressmen. But still he waited, allowing the pressure to build until public opinion polls indicated overwhelming support for a voting rights act. Now he could move forward, although the future remained far from clear. Not even Lyndon Johnson, master of Congress, could predict how the legislature would react on a subject so controversial as the place of black citizens in American life. But doing nothing was no longer a reasonable option. For Lyndon Johnson action was always the best medicine, better than exercise or sunshine. The chains that had bound him were broken, and the fog of depression that had plagued him had lifted. So he partied late into the night, not retiring until 4:25 a.m.⁵⁸

Sunday, however, was no day of rest. Late in the afternoon Johnson called congressional leaders together for a meeting in the Cabinet Room to discuss the next steps. He described the provisions of the bill the Justice Department had now completed and asked if he should submit the bill to Congress along with a written statement, as was usually done, or if he should personally present the bill to a joint session of Congress that would also be televised to the nation. Not since 1946 had a sitting president appeared before Congress to ask them to consider a piece of legislation. Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, the Senate’s leaders and protectors of that body’s prerogatives, preferred the traditional way. Dirksen feared that Johnson would look like he had been forced into submitting the legislation, and Congress would no doubt resent such public pressure.

John McCormack, Speaker of the House, disagreed. At seventy-three, he was the oldest man in the room, and his colleagues respected him greatly. The president should present the bill in person, he insisted. House Majority Leader Carl Albert agreed: “I don’t think your coming before the Congress would be a sign of panic. I think it would help.” This was Johnson’s view too. By 6:30 p.m. a consensus had formed: Johnson would speak to a joint session of Congress and the nation from the House chamber at 9:00 p.m. the following night.59

Little time remained to produce the most important speech of Lyndon Johnson’s career. A Justice Department lawyer had been working on a draft for weeks, but “it just doesn’t sing yet,” Katzenbach had told the president on March 10. Johnson’s aide Horace Busby, a Texan and a longtime friend of the president’s, was given the assignment of revising the lawyer’s draft rather than Johnson’s favorite speechwriter, thirty-three-year-old Richard Goodwin. When Johnson heard the news he was enraged. “Don’t you know a liberal Jew has his hands on the pulse beat of America, and you asked a Texas public relations man?” he asked his aide Jack Valenti. “Get Dick to do it. And now!”⁶⁰

Valenti hurried to Goodwin’s office early on the morning of March 15, only to learn that the young speechwriter rarely showed up for work before 9:30 a.m. He waited there nervously until Goodwin arrived, startling him with the news that he was to write that evening’s speech on voting rights. “Get to work,” Valenti said, then left Goodwin to his task, which had to be completed by mid-afternoon so that aides could load it into the presidential teleprompter. Goodwin relished the job. “It was great working for Johnson,” he later reflected. “I had come to know . . . his pattern of expression, patterns of reasoning, the natural cadences of his speech.” Goodwin also knew that Johnson preferred “forceful, eloquent straightforward” speeches, and that’s what Goodwin would deliver.⁶¹

Goodwin’s past was not very different from Johnson’s. As boys both had experienced near poverty—Johnson in the Texas hill country, Goodwin in Boston and then in rural Maryland, where his father landed a war-time job. Johnson’s modest education and southern roots had left him with a sense of inferiority that no political achievement could wipe away, whereas Goodwin had experienced the taunts and blows of young anti-Semites. Those shared experiences were in the minds of both men as Goodwin worked on the speech. As he stared at the blank page in his typewriter, he could see “images tumbling through my mind—black bodies on the Pettus Bridge . . . the fear of my youth and the horrified terror of . . . men whose faces were contorted by bigotry—‘kike,’ ‘nigger.’ By the purest chance, an accident of time and place, I had been given an opportunity to strike back. . . . I could, that is, if my craft was equal to my passion.”

Goodwin worked tirelessly all morning and into the early afternoon. As he finished a page, it was immediately taken to the president, who left Goodwin alone except for one afternoon call. “You remember, Dick, that one of my first jobs after college was teaching young Mexican-Americans down in Cotulla,” Johnson said after Goodwin had picked up the phone. “I thought you might want to put in a reference to that.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Goodwin said. He knew the story; it was one of Johnson’s favorites.

“I just wanted to remind you,” the president said, then hung up.62

The silence of Goodwin at work, the only sound the tap-tap-tap of the typewriter keys, contrasted sharply with the noise in Lyndon Johnson’s office as he and his aides went over Goodwin’s draft. Long after the point when the speech should have been loaded into the teleprompter, they were still revising it. “As the afternoon wore on, the tension began to mount for everybody,” Lady Bird Johnson later wrote in her diary. “[Lyndon] was going over it . . . a page at a time . . . scratching out lines, giving directions to Jack [Valenti], who looked pale, harassed . . . almost at the breaking point. I could very nearly hear him groan whenever Lyndon marked out a line and wrote in something else. This was still going on at 7 o’clock, and he had to be on the stand delivering it at 9.” Johnson barked at a secretary who typed, he said, “with fourteen goddamn wooden fingers.” Bill Moyers and Harry McPherson offered editorial changes he disliked, causing him to fume, “Every goddamn body around here thinks he’s smarter than I am! I told them what I wanted to say, but this shit has no resemblance to what I want to say.”

Finally, around 7:00, the president announced, “Let’s close it up.” The speech was done. Mrs. Johnson usually saw to the president’s clothes, but this night she had already left for the capitol with daughter Linda Bird, so Paul Glynn, a White House military aide who often doubled as valet, dressed the president in a dark blue suit and light blue shirt, which would come through well on Americans’ black-and-white television screens.63

Johnson invited Goodwin to ride with him to the capitol, allowing the speechwriter to observe the president closely at this historic moment. He was silent, absorbed in the text he was reading by the light of a special lamp installed in his limousine. Occasionally he would underline words or phrases he wished to emphasize. He never looked at his aides or said a word. Not even the chants of the protestors across the street disturbed his reverie, although, as Horace Busby later recalled, “he heard [them].” Only half the speech had been installed in the teleprompter, so Johnson would have to read much of the address from the black loose-leaf notebook in which it rested. Jack Valenti would have the unenviable task of slipping into the well of the House chamber and inserting the rest of the address in the machine. “If you can’t get it on the TelePrompTer,” Johnson warned Valenti, “then I can’t speak.”⁶⁴

At first, ritual suggested Johnson’s appearance was just an ordinary event, not unlike the president’s State of the Union Address delivered just three months earlier. Tonight, as on January 4, it began with the bellowing voice of the doorkeeper, William “Fishbait” Miller, who informed Congress that they had a visitor: “Mistah Speak-ah! The President of the United States!” A burst of applause greeted a sober-faced Johnson as he made his way to the rostrum, not pausing, as in the past, to shake hands, say a word to old friends, or touch their shoulders. As the new vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, looked on, Speaker of the House John McCormack introduced the president. There was more applause. Johnson nodded and looked out at his audience. No doubt he was aware that some of his former colleagues were missing; the Virginia and Mississippi delegations as well as other southerners had decided to boycott the president’s speech. With the crack of McCormack’s gavel, people sat, and there was a moment’s silence as Johnson looked down at his notebook, tweaked his nose, and looked up. “What followed,” noted Time magazine’s correspondent, “was a departure from . . . routine, so startling, so moving, that few who saw it or heard it will ever forget it.”

Slowly, deliberately, he began: “Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of Democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.

“At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many of them were brutally assaulted. One good man—a man of God—was killed.”

There wasn’t a sound in the crowded chamber—not a cough, not a whisper, not a stir. The usually raucous House was as silent as a church.

“There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our Democracy. . . . Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country—to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. . . . Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For, with a country as with a person, ‘what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’”

The biblical quotation produced the first applause. “You can always count on the Bible to get them going,” Goodwin later reflected. But Johnson did not smile or recognize the response in any way. When it was quiet again, he continued.

“There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.” That produced the second sustained applause of the evening.

“And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans . . . to solve that problem.”

He reminded Congress and the country of America’s founding principles, ideas that were beloved by all its citizens. “To deny a man his hopes because of his color or race or his religion or the place of his birth is not only to do injustice, it is to deny Americans and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom,” he said. “Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument: every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. . . . Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.”

Then the president became what he had once been—a teacher, explaining to his countrymen what happens when a southern black man or woman tries to register to vote. “Every device of which human ingenuity is capable, has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists and, if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name, or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application, he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law.

“And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin. . . . No law that we now have on the books can insure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it. In such a case, our duty must be clear to all of us. The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color.”

Now the applause came in continual waves, sometimes after every sentence. Valenti, the official speech statistician, counted thirty-six interruptions, whereas Newsweek’s Samuel Shaffer put it at thirty-nine.65

To correct this denial of the fundamental right to vote, the president proposed a remedy. “Wednesday, I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote. . . . This bill will strike down restrictions to voting in all elections, federal, state and local, which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote.

“This bill will establish a simple, uniform standard which cannot be used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution. It will provide for citizens to be registered by officials of the United States Government, if the state officials refuse to register them. It will eliminate tedious, unnecessary lawsuits which delay the right to vote. Finally, this legislation will insure that properly registered individuals are not prohibited from voting. . . . The command of the Constitution is plain. . . . It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.

“On this issue, there must be no delay, or no hesitation, or no compromise with our purpose. We cannot, we must not, refuse to protect the right of every American to vote in every election that he may desire to participate in.

“And we ought not, and we cannot, and we must not wait . . . before we get a bill. We have already waited 100 years and more and the time for waiting is gone. So I ask you to join me in working long hours and nights and weekends, if necessary, to pass this bill. And I don’t make that request lightly, for, from the window where I sit, with the problems of our country, I recognize that from outside this chamber is the outraged conscience of a nation, the grave concern of many nations and the harsh judgment of history on our acts.”

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Brooklyn Democrat Emanuel Celler, leapt to his feet to lead what became a standing ovation that lasted thirty seconds. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, usually shy and retiring, was “shaking with emotion” and had tears in his eyes, noted Shaffer. The excitement in the chamber gave Valenti the opportunity to slip into the well of the House to insert the rest of the president’s speech into the teleprompter. (“I almost died a thousand deaths getting it here in time,” Valenti said later.)66

Only the speechwriters knew what was coming next, the words that would forever mark that moment as perhaps the greatest in Johnson’s presidency. “What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” He paused, and then, slowly and distinctly, the president uttered the words never before said by an American president: “And—we—shall—overcome.” For a moment there was only stunned silence, as it dawned on all who listened that President Lyndon Johnson, a son of the South, had just evoked the anthem of the civil rights movement. Then the room erupted in applause. Almost everyone rose—save the southerners (“Goddamn,” one cursed) and Senator Dirksen. Johnson glared at Dirksen and paused until the television cameras focused on the senator, who then rose, joining the others who were giving Johnson a standing ovation. “In the galleries, Negroes and whites . . . wept unabashedly,” noted a presidential aide.⁶⁷

In Selma the movement’s leaders had gathered at the home of Sullivan Jackson to watch Johnson’s speech. When he uttered those three incredible words, “We shall overcome,” King’s lieutenants were shocked, then cried out, “Can you believe he said that?” John Lewis looked over at King and saw him wipe tears from his cheek.68

In private, during the days before the speech, Johnson had often complained about the demonstrators’ impatience and their failure, as he saw it, to appreciate all that he had done for black Americans. Tonight, however, he had only empathy and praise for these men and women. “A century has passed—more than 100 years—since the Negro was freed,” Johnson said after the applause had died down. “And he is not fully free tonight. It was more than 100 years ago that Abraham Lincoln . . . signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact. . . . The time of justice has now come, and I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come, and when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.

“The real hero of this struggle,” Johnson continued, “is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety, and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform. He has been called upon to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery and his faith in American democracy? For at the real heart of the battle for equality is a deep-seated belief in the democratic process. Equality depends, not on the force of arms or tear gas, but depends upon the force of moral right.”

His speech had already gone past the half-hour mark, and for all its drama, his audience was growing restless. But he had more to say. In the last few minutes of his speech Johnson took Congress and the country back into his own past for another lesson on the evil of prejudice. He was just twenty years old, he told his audience, when his first job took him to the small, impoverished town of Cotulla, Texas, where he taught young Mexican Americans. He smiled at the memory of it but then grew serious again. “Few of them could speak English and I couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast and hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes.

“I often walked home late in the afternoon after the classes were finished wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that I might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.

“I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance.”

His eyes narrowed and his voice grew more determined: “I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it. And I hope that you will use it with me.” He was almost finished, but he wanted all to know what kind of president he wished to be—one who educated the young, fed the hungry, helped the poor, ended hatred, “and protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election.” He asked Congress to join him in this historic task.69

He departed the House chamber “a changed man,” Time later observed, “certain that he had launched the U.S. itself inexorably toward a new purpose.” But although Johnson had stirred the nation’s soul, the true impact of his words had yet to be gauged. He would now need the members of Congress to do more than just applaud. If his words were to be turned into deeds, Congress would have to turn his bill into law.⁷⁰