THE PRESIDENT HAD SPOKEN. A VOTING RIGHTS BILL WOULD SOON BE SENT to Congress. Martin Luther King greeted the news with relief, but he could not afford to celebrate for long.
The civil rights coalition was as fragile as ever, and there was no guarantee that lobbying for the Voting Rights Bill would hold it together. Lawyer J. L. Chestnut, reflecting the views of many Selma activists, feared that Lyndon Johnson—not King—had become “the number-one civil rights leader in America,” that the president had “outfoxed” and “co-opted” King and his allies. “If [Johnson] became recognized as the man responsible for our civil rights victories and allowed to set our agenda,” Chestnut later wrote, “did this mean the end of the movement?” Marches and demonstrations should continue, Chestnut believed, so that the president understood that they still controlled the movement.1
SNCC’s Jim Forman and his followers agreed. They were not impressed by Johnson’s speech—which King had publicly called “one of the most eloquent . . . and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States.” SNCC’s official photographer, after listening to Johnson, said he “wanted to puke,” whereas Forman thought that by invoking “We Shall Overcome,” Johnson had simply “spoiled a good song.” If the movement splintered, violence might result, thereby affecting Judge Johnson’s pending decision to allow another march to Montgomery and also play into the hands of the bill’s congressional opponents. That was Martin Luther King’s fear following Johnson’s address, and events quickly proved that his concern was well founded.2
Forman had already moved his troops into Montgomery, and although King publicly endorsed continued demonstrations in the city as a way to keep pressure on the Johnson administration, SNCC activities were becoming more violent. Less than twenty-four hours after Johnson spoke a SNCC-led march on the capitol caused state troopers to go berserk again, riding their horses into the marchers and hitting them with ropes and billy clubs. This group, which included students from nearby Alabama State University and a large contingent of white students from northern schools, turned on the troopers. “Kill them!” one yelled, and some threw bricks as others screamed “Pigs!” and “Fascists!” Although such confrontations were exactly what organizers wanted, the demonstrators also knew that responding with force could hurt their own cause. Jim Bevel, a King lieutenant but one whose relationship with SNCC was good, urged the demonstrators not to battle with the police, stating, “Wallace would love for you to knock a policeman’s eye out. Then he could go on television and talk about a one-eyed policeman for two months.”3
In Selma the protests also took a new turn when a group of thirty-six whites, many of them ministers dressed in clerical garb, attempted to picket the home of Mayor Smitherman, located in a more affluent part of the city that civil rights workers had not yet targeted. They accused Smitherman of doing nothing about the unpaved streets and uncollected garbage in the city’s black section, and they carried signs that read, “When Will You Hire Negroes For Decent City Jobs” and “We Demand Integrated Education For All.” Wilson Baker protected the mayor’s home, and when some of the neighborhood’s white residents attacked two of the protestors, the usually unflappable police chief lost his temper. “We [warned] them there would be trouble out here,” he told reporters, adding that he believed that the ministers “want people killed. They really want people killed.”
Baker turned on the protestors in much the same way that Jim Clark had in past confrontations. With his cigar clamped firmly between his teeth, Baker grabbed the Reverend Boniface Prater of Chicago and roughly turned him around. When Prater’s colleagues tried to restrain Baker, he yelled, “Don’t put your damned hands on me, you non-violent fools.” To Prater, Baker said, “I’m going to take you to a mental institution. You’re sick.” They were all “mentally sick,” he told the protestors. He arrested all thirty-six of them for picketing in a residential area. While they waited to be loaded onto school buses, they sang, “We Shall Overcome” in a rather off-key fashion. “This has ceased to be a Negro movement,” Baker told the Times’s Roy Reed. “It’s become a misfit white movement. At least we had good music when the Negroes were demonstrating.”4
While Wilson Baker was cursing ministers in Selma, Judge Frank M. Johnson in Montgomery was having a similarly harsh conversation with Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. The attorney general had called Johnson on March 17 asking when a decision to allow or prohibit King’s march might be forthcoming. Johnson had already decided to allow the march to proceed, but he wanted some guarantees: “I want the assurance that when I issue this order—and they rightly deserve this order—that it will be backed by the government of the United States.”
Katzenbach was confused. “Backed? Well, I think we can back it.”
“I don’t care what you think,” Johnson bluntly told the attorney general. “I don’t intend to go out on a limb with an order that will not be backed up by this government. If Wallace pulls some grandstand play . . . I want to know that this government will be prepared to meet it. It won’t be fair to this court and to the people to have an order that does not have support.”
“All right. You’ve got my assurance,” Katzenbach said.
That was not good enough for Johnson, a judge whose withering stare was known to cause lawyers to faint in his courtroom. “I don’t want your assurance, Mr. Katzenbach. I want it from the President. I want to know before I issue this order.”
“OK,” the attorney general sighed. “I’ll get back with you, Judge.”5
Judge Johnson made up his mind largely in response to the testimony from those who were assaulted on Bloody Sunday, the violence of which he wanted to avoid at the next march. On Monday, March 15, the last day of the proceedings, he permitted the showing of CBS’s footage of what occurred on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Luck was with the movement, because the CBS film, just three minutes long, was the footage taken by Laurens Pierce, whose camerawork had captured the most shocking aspects of the attack on the marchers. John Lewis, in court that day, studied the judge closely. Johnson seemed transfixed by the scenes, and when the film ended, he looked “obviously disgusted. . . . From his demeanor, I just knew he was going to rule for us,” Lewis later wrote.6
He did. On the evening of March 15, while President Johnson was addressing the nation, Judge Johnson contacted King’s lawyers and asked them to draft a plan detailing how they would march from Selma to Montgomery: How many people would be involved? How would they be fed and sheltered during the fifty-mile trek? What route would they take? The judge wanted answers and fast. The lawyers worked all evening and gave the document to Judge Johnson the following morning. That day and the next, Johnson worked on his order. On Wednesday the telephone interrupted him with the call from Katzenbach, who gave him the assurances he had demanded.
“You got it,” the attorney general told him.
Johnson wanted to make sure there would be no mistakes. “From the President?”
“Yes, sir. From the President.”
“Good enough,” Johnson said. Later that afternoon he publicly issued his order.7
Frank Johnson didn’t care much for Martin Luther King or sit-ins, boycotts, and marches because in his view the courts were available to redress black grievances. But he did believe strongly that all Americans had a constitutional right to assemble peacefully, and that was the issue now before him. The evidence the plaintiffs presented was clear, the judge proclaimed. Since January 2, 1965, Sheriff Clark, his deputies, and posse men had been guilty of “harassment, intimidation, coercion, threatening conduct, and sometimes, brutal mistreatment” of black Americans in Dallas County, violating rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution as well as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth. Such misconduct had climaxed on Bloody Sunday.
The judge admitted that a future march might affect the right of Alabamians to travel along the prescribed route, so he rested his decision on what some thought was an unusual principle, which he called “proportionality.” An American’s right to protest, Johnson said, “should be commensurate with the enormity of the wrongs that are being protested and petitioned against. In this case,” he concluded, “the wrongs are enormous . . . and the right to demonstrate against these wrongs should be determined accordingly.”
Johnson ruled that a new march could proceed between March 19 and March 22, protected by Alabama law enforcement. However, if the state found it too difficult to provide such protection, the US government would handle it at the governor’s request. There would be no further violence. The court specifically prohibited Sheriff Clark and Wallace’s Al Lingo from “arresting, harassing, thwarting or in any way interfering with the effort to march from Selma to Montgomery.”8
For King, Johnson’s decision could not have come at a better time. On that Wednesday he was in Montgomery to show his support for SNCC, although privately their violent actions distressed him. At a rally at the Baptist Beulah Church the previous night he had listened uncomfortably as Forman whipped the crowd into a frenzy. “There’s only one man in the country that can stop George Wallace and those posses,” Forman said. “These problems will not be solved until the man in that shaggedy old place called the White House begins to shake and gets on the phone and says, ‘Now listen, George, we’re coming down there and throw you in jail if you don’t stop that mess.’” Then Forman had shocked his audience of clergy and black families, including women and children, by saying, “If we can’t sit at the table of democracy, we’ll knock the fucking legs off!” His followers erupted in cheers, drowning out his quick apology for the expletive. King’s own speech attempted to restore order, but it was Forman who won the night and the next day too—until Judge Johnson came to King’s rescue.9
Before news of Johnson’s order came through, Forman and SNCC had seemed to be ascending in Montgomery. City officials, also worried by the violent turn of events, had apologized for the assault on SNCC protestors and invited King and Forman to discuss how to handle future protests in the city. At the conclusion of their meeting King told a crowd that had waited for him in the rain that Montgomery’s leaders had agreed to prohibit Clark’s posse from enforcing the law, a decision that seemed to vindicate Forman’s more radical approach—until Andy Young excitedly informed him of Judge Johnson’s decision. “I think this will come as a source of joy to all of us,” a smiling King proclaimed: “Judge Johnson has just ruled that we have a legal and Constitutional right to march from Selma to Montgomery!” The people cheered, encouraging King’s hope that nonviolence had carried the day. But once again Forman and other SNCC officials refused to endorse the march, although they would allow individual members to participate. Nobody would prevent an excited John Lewis from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and in the end, Forman would join the marchers too.10
Only one issue remained. Who would protect the marchers—Alabama troopers or federal forces? Governor Wallace quickly made it clear that he opposed the march and that the state could not afford to police such an ambitious endeavor. On March 18 he called the president: “These people are pouring in from all over the country,” he complained. “It infuriates people. . . . They’re going to bankrupt the state.” Wallace did not want to ask for federal help, and an angry Johnson, knowing that the governor commanded ten thousand National Guardsmen, urged him to call them up, but the governor refused. “You’re dealing with a very treacherous guy,” Johnson told an aide after getting off the phone with Wallace. “He’s a no good son of a bitch.”11
In Alabama, however, Wallace was a hero. His fellow citizens saw themselves as victims of “Communist trained anarchists” and thought of Wallace as their savior. His refusal to protect the marchers only added to his popularity. Addressing a special joint session of the state legislature, Wallace called Frank Johnson “a hypocritical judge” who believed in “mob rule.” He claimed that the march would bring to Alabama “every left wing, pro-Communist . . . and Communist in the country . . . along with the usual number of dupes and poor misguided individuals.” Women wept, and legislators applauded wildly.12
Johnson had only one option. To enforce Judge Johnson’s order, he federalized the state’s National Guard, just as Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had done in earlier racial crises in Arkansas, Mississippi, and, in 1963, in Alabama itself. The president also directed the secretary of defense to employ the armed forces of the United States, if necessary. He sent one hundred FBI agents and US marshals, one thousand military policemen, and two thousand US Army troops to Selma, eventually bringing Washington’s protective presence there to more than three thousand. Deputy US attorney general Ramsay Clark supervised the federal effort, and Assistant Attorney General John Doar would also accompany the marchers.13
King announced that the march would begin on Sunday, March 21, and end in Montgomery four days later. He invited “all of our friends of goodwill across the nation to join with us in this gigantic witness to the fulfillment of democracy.” On March 25 he would speak on the steps of the state capitol, and a delegation would give Governor Wallace a petition describing black grievances.
During the days that followed, King’s staff hurried to complete the arrangements for the trip. Campsites were located, plans to feed the marchers were finalized, and medical support was arranged. Anyone who became ill or was injured would be cared for by the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which had provided heroic service on Bloody Sunday. Almost one hundred physicians and nurses soon descended on Selma to assist them. Black morticians turned their hearses into ambulances, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union donated a mobile hospital capable of responding to almost any medical crisis that developed.14
The size of the crowd was greater than King had hoped. There were thirty-six hundred would-be marchers waiting to follow him: rabbis, ministers, nuns, and prominent religious leaders as well as civil rights icons like Rosa Parks and A. Philip Randolph, the seventy-six-year-old president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, whose threat to lead a black march on Washington in 1941 forced FDR to ban discrimination in war-time industry. Dr. Ralph Bunche, UN official and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, would participate, as would teachers and college professors, alongside their students, who were dressed casually in denim and sweaters; labor leaders and New York politicians; actors and musicians; and ordinary men and women like Detroit mother and part-time student Viola Liuzzo, who had loaned her car to the movement and greeted newcomers at the movement’s hospitality suite. She wanted to do more than just march, and later she would get her chance. Physical problems wouldn’t stop Joe Young, a poor Georgian who was blind, or Michigan’s Jim Letherer, whose disability forced him to walk on crutches. “My handicap is not that I have one leg,” he told a reporter. “It is that I cannot do more to help these people vote.” The movement’s leaders and victims of the Marion riot were also represented: John Lewis and Hosea Williams, who were bloodied on the bridge; Amelia Boynton and Annie Cooper, who were beaten by Sheriff Clark; and Cager Lee, Jimmie Lee Jackson’s eighty-two-year-old grandfather, who remarked that if Jimmie Lee “had to die for something, thank God it was for this,” the right to vote.15
Perhaps no one was more excited about the coming journey than eight-year-old Sheyann Webb and her best friend, nine-year-old Rachel West. They had first met Dr. King during his visit to Brown Chapel in February and formed an affectionate bond between them. He often invited the girls to join him at the pulpit to sing one of his favorite freedom songs, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round.” But they also defied their parents by attending rallies and marches on the courthouse, where Sheyann had seen Sheriff Clark drag Amelia Boynton off to jail. On Sunday, March 7, the two girls had even joined those headed for the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but when they arrived there Rachel was too afraid to go forward. Sheyann went on alone and was there when the attack occurred. Coughing and choking, she had turned away from the troopers when suddenly a man, Hosea Williams, picked her up and carried her through the clouds of tear gas, which blinded them both. But Williams wasn’t moving fast enough to suit Sheyann, so she yelled, “Put me down!” He refused until they were safely off the bridge, then put her down. She left him far behind, running faster than she thought possible through the streets of Selma, dodging cars and men on horseback until she reached her home. As her stunned parents tried to comfort the shaking child, she was ashamed rather than frightened, feeling, she later confessed, like a slave who had been beaten by her master.16
On Sunday, March 21, before sneaking out of the house to join Rachel and the others at Brown Chapel, Sheyann left her parents a note. It was her own obituary, so that they would know where to look for her body. It read, “Sheyann Webb, 8 years, was killed today. She was one of Dr. King’s freedom fighters. She was a student at Clark School, Selma. Sheyann want [sic] all the people to be free and happy.”17
At 12:30 Dr. King addressed the marchers who had assembled at Brown Chapel, telling them to maintain their resolve during the coming march. “You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history of our nation,” he said. “Walk together, children, and don’t you get weary, and it will lead us to the promised land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama. And America will be a new America.”
Suddenly, a group of Alabama National Guard jeeps appeared and began driving through the crowd, which parted to avoid being run down. “Didn’t realize we were interrupting,” laughed one driver, his uniform emblazoned with the letters D.D.—Dixie Division—his southern accent unmistakable. The jeeps withdrew, leaving no casualties behind. It was never determined whether the incident was an accident or a deliberate provocation. King, fearing that the marchers’ confidence had been undermined, quickly finished his remarks and asked Sheyann and Rachel to sing “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom.” There was a final rendition of “We Shall Overcome” before the leaders organized the group into columns and the marchers moved into the street.18
It was an inauspicious beginning that left some participants in a nervous frame of mind. The marchers, however, weren’t the only ones who were apprehensive. Mayor Smitherman expressed his unhappiness to a reporter: “I will be glad to get these people out of town—but I am afraid that some of them will come back.” Sheriff Clark thought the whole thing was unnecessary: “We were very happy before and I say 90 percent of our colored people was happy [sic].” But these were only words; no Selma official tried to block the marchers, so the protestors’ fears passed quickly, especially when they saw US Army helicopters circling above them and a truck leading the procession, providing some protection from a frontal assault. It carried network television cameramen photographing them as well as the National Guardsmen, who were thus forced by the cameras to be on their best behavior as they accompanied the marchers through the city streets.
If no one tried to assault the marchers, it wasn’t because Selma’s white population had suddenly grown more accommodating. Perhaps Sheyann and Rachel were too young to appreciate the meaning of the song a local radio station played, blasted through loud speakers someone had set up in the crowd of onlookers. The refrain repeated again and again,
Pack up all my care and woe,
Here I go,
Singing low,
Bye bye blackbird
But the girls were long accustomed to seeing the signs unhappy white men held: “I Hate Niggers,” “Too Bad Reeb,” and “Walk Coon.”19
The marchers stopped on the Edmund Pettus Bridge where, two weeks before, Major Cloud had yelled, “troopers advance,” and the assault had commenced. Hosea Williams had particularly bad memories of the bridge. “This is the place where State Troopers whipped us,” he told King. “The savage beasts beat us on this spot.” There was silence. Some of the younger marchers lay down on the ground, then there were cheers as many sang out another movement anthem:
Paul and Silas bound in jail
Had no money for da go de bail
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Hold on, hold on,
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.20
Leaving the bridge, they marched down four-lane Jefferson Davis Highway, where they encountered more hecklers. One driver yelled, “Go to hell,” while one of his children cried out, “Look at them niggers.” A heavy-set woman shouted at several nuns, “You’re going to burn in hell with the rest of them.” The marchers, however, seemed unaffected by their taunts: “The people just seemed like something had been lifted from their shoulders,” Sheyann later recalled. “They were so proud, but it was a pride that was dignified. We had always maintained that dignity.”21
They covered a little over seven miles by sundown. At that time the marchers turned off Jefferson Davis Highway and proceeded to David and Rosa Bell Hall’s eighty-acre farm, where they would spend the night. The Halls, neither of whom was registered to vote (“it just never seemed worthwhile to try,” said Mrs. Hall), lived with their eight children in a three-room shack without indoor plumbing. Fearing retaliation, they had first hesitated when asked if King’s people could bed down in their field. “David didn’t know what to do,” Mrs. Hall told the Times’s Paul A. Montgomery. “But finally we decided we just had to do it.”22
At the Hall Farm most of the first day’s group prepared to return to Selma. Only three hundred marchers would be allowed to proceed past the point where the highway became a two-lane country road—one of the conditions of Judge Johnson’s order—so the rest boarded cars and buses that took them back into town. Sheyann and Rachel were exhilarated and wanted to keep marching. “It seem like we marchin’ to Heaven today,” Sheyann told Rachel, who replied, “Ain’t we?” It was then that Dr. King discovered the two youngest marchers. “Aren’t you tired?” King asked, delighted to see them. The girls laughed and Sheyann said, “My feets and legs be tired, but my soul still feels like marchin’.” But when Sheyann admitted that she was there without her mother’s permission, King made sure they were put on a bus for home.23
The lucky 300 who remained—280 black Alabamians and 20 white volunteers from across America—ate a buffet dinner of spaghetti and meat sauce, served on paper plates from new, immaculately clean trash cans. Men and women slept in separate tents to squelch the accusations of hostile southerners like Alabama’s Congressman William Dickinson, whose words were broadcast over the transistor radios many of the marchers carried. “Free love among this group is not only condoned, it is encouraged,” the congressman proclaimed. “Only by the ultimate sex act with one of another color can they demonstrate that they have no prejudice.” This produced laughter from the exhausted marchers: “These white folks must think we’re supermen to be able to march all day . . . make whoopee all night and . . . then march all day again,” said one black man. But the scurrilous charges persisted. A Montgomery radio personality informed his listeners that white women marchers would be returning to their homes in Boston and San Francisco “as expectant unwed mothers.” The remark didn’t surprise John Lewis: “These white segregationists always think about fornication,” he remarked. “That’s why you see so many shades of brown on this march.”24
King spent the night uncomfortably nestled inside a sleeping bag at the command headquarters, a mobile van. That day’s walk had left him with a painful blister on his left foot, and he told Ralph Abernathy that he doubted whether he would be able to complete the long journey. The younger marchers, meanwhile, were too excited to sleep. They gathered around campfires singing freedom songs, disturbing the sleep of older folks, who had a restless night. There was a shortage of blankets, and the temperature dipped below freezing. To one reporter, the encampment, its perimeter guarded by US Army troops, “resembled a cross between a ‘Grapes of Wrath’ migrant labor camp and the Continental Army bivouac at Valley Forge.”25
The next morning the marchers ate toast and oatmeal without milk, which caused one man to complain that the cereal tasted like “unfermented library paste.” An angry Andy Young told them, “You’re not better than two-thirds of the Negroes in Alabama. The average Negro here makes less than $2,000 a year and you can’t put cream on your oatmeal with that.” After breakfast the weary travelers set out slowly on a sixteen-mile journey to their next campsite. “You are going too slow,” Young called out. “You’re holding up the civil rights movement.”
The day began uneventfully, but there were ominous signs on the horizon. Lowndes County lay ahead, infamous for the number of black citizens who had been lynched or had died mysteriously. Rumors put the marchers on edge: someone had heard that bombs and land mines had been hidden along the route and that Klansmen were planning to set loose deadly snakes when the marchers stopped for lunch or left the road to relieve themselves. The county’s landscape intensified their fears: They walked by moss-covered trees that might hide snipers and saw swamps filled with man-eating alligators. Troops and guardsmen combed the nearby woods but found nothing dangerous. This was “a full blown military operation,” said one officer. “It’s no different from the way we would screen a route in Vietnam.”26
Protected by the federalized Alabama National Guard and US Army troops, marchers enter Lowndes County on their way to Montgomery. © 1965 SPIDER MARTIN
When they crossed the county line and entered Lowndes County at 12:13 p.m., King called out, “Pick it up, now. Everybody join in,” and he began singing, “We Shall Overcome.” His followers joined him. Abernathy, the official cheerleader, turned to the marchers and loudly asked, “What do you want?”
“Freedom!” they answered back with equal enthusiasm.
“What are we going to get?” Abernathy asked.
“Freedom!” they yelled.
Danger seemed to rear its head when a small plane swooped down over the marchers. Its payload turned out to be leaflets, announcing that the black activists could expect to lose their jobs. The plane was later identified as belonging to the Confederate Air Force. A reporter asked Jack Rosenthal, a Justice Department official, if they could do anything about the plane, as it might be capable of bombing them. “What do you want us to do?” asked an exasperated Rosenthal. “Use anti-aircraft guns?”27
Later word reached King that down the road men were erecting signs accusing him of being a Communist. When the marchers came upon one, it was a billboard depicting King in a meeting with a group said to be “national Communist leaders.” The picture did not surprise King. It had been taken in 1957, when he spoke at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, a controversial center of economic and political activism in the South. During a break in the march King told reporters that he had visited the school eight years earlier, as had many veterans of the civil rights movement. The school’s enemies had considered it a center of Bolshevism since its creation in 1932. The photograph had been a staple of southern segregationists because it was taken by a spy for the Georgia White Citizen’s Council. “There are about as many Communists in the Civil Rights movement as there are Eskimos in Florida,” King joked. He called the accusation “absurd.”28
Soon the marchers began to see Negro bystanders along the road, staring at them in silence as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing: a rag-tag army, some wearing berets, cowboy hats, or head scarves—anything to protect them from sunburn or sunstroke—led by a black man wearing a green cap and ear muffs. At Trickem Fork, an especially impoverished black community, Young called the marchers’ attention to a run-down church on the verge of collapse. “Look at that! That’s why we’re marching!” Hopefully, such dwellings would disappear when black voters elected representatives who cared how they lived and died. Nearby was a structure in even worse condition—its windows covered by cardboard, its walls pocked by holes, its roof almost open to the sky. It was Trickem’s only school.
They stopped briefly so King could talk to some older citizens, who treated him as if he were a movie star. After embracing him a woman cried, “I done kissed the Martin Luther King!”
“Are you people gonna register to vote?” Young asked them. “We’re not just marchin’ here for fun.”
“Yes sir,” they told King and Young, and they kept their promise. Later these elderly men and women walked to the registrar’s office in Hayneville, the county seat, and were among the first blacks in a century to demand the right to vote.29
The marchers spent a quiet, uneventful night at Rosa Steele’s farm near Big Swamp Creek. Mrs. Steele, seventy-eight years old and widowed, owned a small grocery store on Highway 80 and had shared the Halls’ reluctance to work with King. “At first I didn’t think [the movement] amounted to much,” she told a reporter. “I guess I’ve lived too long and just didn’t think things would change—until I heard the president’s speech. . . . If the president can take a stand, I guess I can too.” Later local segregationists tried to destroy her business by threatening the vendors who stocked her shelves, but another black merchant helped drive them off.30
After a journey of more than twenty-three miles, some of the marchers required medical attention, and all were thoroughly worn out. Like King, many had blistered feet and sunburned faces. Most went to bed early. King left the party briefly to go to Cleveland to fulfill a speaking commitment arranged earlier. “De Lawd departs,” said one member of SNCC contemptuously. Williams quickly defended King. “It isn’t the President’s job to be in the sun and the mud all the time,” Williams insisted. “His job was to lead us out of Selma—that was the most dangerous part. Then he’s gone, trying to raise our budget around the country. He is telling our story.”31
On Tuesday, the third day, nature turned against the marchers. It rained all day—a cold, heavy storm that lashed them unmercifully. They quickly improvised, turning cereal boxes into hats and sheets of plastic into ponchos. Everyone was drenched, from the poorest seamstress to Assistant Attorney General John Doar, who was “soaked to the skin, his hair hanging across his forehead in weeping ringlets,” according to the New York Times’s Roy Reed. But the downpour did not dampen the marchers’ spirits. “Somebody started to sing,” one of the marchers later recalled. “Everybody’s head snapped up and people had fire in their eyes, and suddenly it was a march again. It was incredible.”32
The rain was unrelenting, and their campsite that night, a pasture owned by black millionaire A. G. Gaston, was a mud-filled morass. King’s staff put down hay, but it was sucked into the ooze. Tempers flared: two photographers got into a fistfight, an Alabama guardsman spat on a priest, and Alabama troopers insulted black passersby. Wet, dirty, and bedraggled though they were, all took comfort in the fact that half their journey was over: Montgomery was just twenty miles away.33
They were up very early the next morning. By seven o’clock they were again on the road, with Andy Young in front, the group’s leader for at least a few hours. A mile later the marchers crossed the Montgomery County line, leaving Lowndes County behind. The road again became a four-lane highway, and hundreds of new marchers joined the throng. King arrived with his wife, Coretta, and Abernathy at eleven o’clock. “We have a new song to sing,” he said. “We have overcome.”34
John Doar, assistant attorney general for civil rights, accompanied the marchers on their fifty-four-mile journey from Selma to Montgomery and protected Dr. King from a would-be assassin. © 1976 MATT HERRON/TAKE STOCK/THE IMAGE WORKS
As they entered the city of Montgomery, their numbers had grown from the original three hundred to about five thousand. They had walked sixteen miles that day mostly in sunshine, but just as they reached the city, torrential rainfall briefly doused them. It didn’t dampen their spirits, however. “The marchers were ecstatic,” noted one reporter. “[They] pushed down the street joyfully, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ at the top of their lungs.” Decades later Bruce Hartford, a white Californian, remembered one incident that, for him, personified the meaning of the march. They were in the business district, passing a motel, and saw standing outside its cleaning staff with their carts of fresh linen and towels. “The maids were excited to see the marchers, they wanted to cheer, they wanted to join the march,” Hartford thought, but to do so would undoubtedly cost them their jobs. Behind them was their boss, “glowering at them” and at the marchers too. “Suddenly one of them started to cheer, and they all started to cheer, and several of them . . . ran out and joined the march under the eyes of their supervisors.” Joining the marchers had allowed these workers, however briefly, to break the shackles of an informal peonage, ignoring the likely consequences in order to achieve a very personal fulfillment. Such moments of individual liberation would be the march’s greatest achievement.35
No one would forget the last night of the march, when the participants camped in a muddy ballpark on the grounds of the City of St. Jude, a Catholic medical, religious, and educational complex outside Montgomery that also served as a movement headquarters. Answering the call of Harry Belafonte, musicians, actors, and comedians from Broadway to Hollywood had arrived in Montgomery to entertain the marchers, whose numbers had now swelled to approximately ten thousand. The celebrities performed on a stage built from coffin crates, surrounded by a crowd so densely packed that fifty-seven people fainted. Sammy Davis Jr. serenaded the marchers. Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a movement anthem. Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the brilliant satirists, added their own unique brand of humor: Alabama could not afford to protect the marchers, they said, because jailing protestors was so expensive, “to say nothing of the upkeep on cattle prods and bull whips.” Nina Simone probably stole the show with her angry rendition of “Mississippi Goddam.” Also there were Dick Gregory, Alan King, and actors Anthony Perkins and Shelly Winters, among many more.
Dr. King spoke as well, urging “every self-respecting Negro here” to march with them on the capitol. “Yea, Yea,” screamed the crowd, an overwhelming assurance that they would be with him tomorrow.36
So far the trek had been peaceful. The only casualties were those people with blistered feet and sunburned faces. King’s fears about an assassination attempt had also proved unfounded—until, that is, terrible news reached him early on the final day, March 25.
Andy Young was the first of King’s inner circle to learn of the newly discovered threat to their leader’s life. “Andy, we have reports that there’s a sniper in the outskirts of Montgomery waiting to shoot Dr. King,” Assistant Attorney General John Doar told Young. The FBI was busy checking out the buildings that overlooked their route, but there wasn’t enough time to examine every spot. King should leave the march and drive to the capitol, Doar strongly urged. But, as Young expected, King refused to leave his supporters behind. “I don’t care what happens,” King said. “I have to march and I have to be in the front line.” When Young told Doar of King’s response to the news, Doar shrugged fatalistically and said, “In that case there is nothing we can do.”
But Young would not let King march unprotected, so he developed a scheme he hoped would work. He was of course familiar with the old racist adage that “all blacks look alike,” so he invited black ministers who resembled King in physique and dress to join their leader at the head of the march. Fifteen happy ministers, each wearing a blue suit like King’s, quickly came to his side. “They never did find out why they were there,” Young later wrote.37
Doar didn’t abandon King to his fate, either. Accompanied by US marshal James McShane, the assistant attorney general walked casually up Dexter Avenue, almost a block ahead of King and the thirty thousand marchers. Doar looked like he was just enjoying an afternoon stroll—he was eating an apple as he walked—but he and McShane were surreptitiously scanning open windows along the route, looking for places where an assassin might lurk. There were eight hundred soldiers stationed along the parade route, and helicopters hovered above, but Doar and McShane were taking no chances.
At several fearful moments it seemed like violence was indeed going to mar the last day of the march. Despite the overwhelming presence of troops and FBI agents, violent encounters still occurred, as when a fistfight erupted between marchers and angry whites. And at one point McShane stopped suddenly, removed his sunglasses, and pointed to what looked like a rifle protruding from a window. He moved toward it cautiously. A closer look revealed that it was only a television camera, much to McShane’s relief.38
When the marchers reached the white-colored State House, they noticed that its dome flew the Alabama and Confederate flags, whereas off to the side the American flag fluttered slightly in the breeze. Someone began singing the “Star Spangled Banner,” and everyone joined in, then adding, for good measure, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That popular anthem of the northern cause must have annoyed Governor Wallace and the city’s citizens, many of whom stood by waving tiny Confederate flags. For many white southerners Montgomery was historically sacred, as the place where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America.
For Wallace, however, the city had a more contemporary meaning. It was here in 1963 that he had officially become governor of Alabama, proclaiming, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.” And Wallace was not going to renege on that promise with anything resembling grace or good humor. He had placed uniformed members of the Alabama Game and Fish Service at the capitol steps “to keep that s.o.b. King from desecrating the Cradle of the Confederacy,” said the governor’s aide. Wallace occasionally peeked through his office blinds, watching the demonstrators—now numbering close to thirty thousand—through a pair of binoculars. He too was awed by the size of the crowd. “My God, it looks like an army,” he told reporter Bob Ingram. And someone added, “Those are the next voters in Alabama.”39
The march’s final mass meeting began around three o’clock, as speakers and entertainers climbed atop a specially built platform that acted as a stage. Young was the first to speak: “This is a revolution,” he cried, “a revolution that won’t fire a shot. We come to love the hell out of the State of Alabama.” Albert Turner, leader of the Marion group and friend of the fallen Jimmie Lee Jackson, expressed embarrassment: “I look worse than anybody else on this stage,” he told the crowd. That’s because I marched fifty miles.” Amelia Boynton read the petition they hoped to present to the governor at the conclusion of the day’s events and received warm applause. Dr. Bunche spoke, as did A. Philip Randolph and Rosa Parks, who was treated like the real star of the festivities. But soon the crowd grew restless, as most waited for the man they thought had made this triumph possible: Martin Luther King Jr.40
King’s address, which began close to four o’clock, was so powerful and eloquent that it rivaled his “I Have a Dream” speech, although it is not as well remembered. “They told us we wouldn’t get here,” he told the crowd, which the New York Times later called, “the greatest demonstration in the history of the civil rights movement.” “And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies,” he continued, “but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama, saying ‘We ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.’ We are on the move now and no wave of racism can stop us.”
“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Dr. King tells a crowd of twenty-five thousand at the end of the march. © 1965 SPIDER MARTIN
King then discussed the specific issues that had brought so many people to Montgomery that day. “Let us march on segregated schools,” he admonished, “until every vestige of segregation and inferior education becomes a thing of the past and Negroes and whites study side by side in the socially healing context of the classroom. Let us march on ballot boxes until race baiters disappear from the political arena.”
The past two months had seen incredible progress, King assured his audience. “Selma, Alabama, has become a shining moment in the conscience of man. If the worst in American life lurked in the dark streets, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it.”
The crowd remained quiet at first, reflecting the split within the movement. Although many of the older veterans saw the day as the culmination of a long struggle (which, indeed, had begun a decade earlier in these very streets with the Montgomery Bus Boycott), many of the young activists in the crowd were disgusted by what they saw as King’s opportunism and by the media attention King had received. The three major television networks covered both the march and the speech. But it was hard to be unaffected for long by King’s enthusiasm, and the divisions disappeared as everyone responded with cries of “Speak! Speak!” Among them were Sheyann Webb and Rachel West, brought to Montgomery by their equally excited parents. Viola Liuzzo applauded with tears in her eyes, while Annie Cooper, who had lost her job because she’d tried to register to vote, thought she’d never see King more passionate: “His eyes were just a’twinklin,” she told the journalist Frye Gaillard many years later.41
“Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man,” King continued, “but to win his friendship and understanding. The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.
“How long must justice be crucified and truth buried?” he asked then quickly answered. “How long? Not long because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow. How long? Not long because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long, ’cause mine eyes have seen the coming of the Lord.” Then the crowd repeated after him, “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on. . . . Glory, glory hallelujah.” At those words the crowd rose together, cheering and clapping so loud that the sound echoed through the capitol. Then they sang “We Shall Overcome,” bringing to a close this joyous—and hard-won—event.42
But the day was not over for Amelia Boynton and the delegation appointed to present Governor Wallace with their list of grievances. When they marched to the capitol steps, however, state troopers blocked them, informing them that the governor was no longer in his office. A few minutes later they tried again, and this time managed to meet with Wallace’s secretary. But he would not commit the governor to any future meeting. In one sense, at least, the marchers had failed.43
PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND NICHOLAS KATZENBACH WERE GREATLY RELIEVED that nothing had occurred to mar the Selma-to-Montgomery march. So was Andrew Young. After returning to the church on Dexter Avenue where King had once pastored a decade earlier, Young “just let the tears flow,” he later recalled. “Tears of relief that we had completed the march without any bloodshed, that we had actually pulled it off, this virtual strolling city of five days’ duration across the lonely Alabama terrain, a feat we could not possibly have foreseen when we were beginning our campaign.”44
John Doar also felt pleased but was still vigilant as the National Guard and federal troops withdrew from the capitol and the marchers boarded trains and planes for home. Although the marchers had been instructed to leave immediately, violent confrontations with local citizens were still possible, perhaps even inevitable. SCLC volunteers were driving people to the airport or back to Selma, but James Orange, King’s aide in charge of transportation, urged them to use the movement’s vehicles and travel in a caravan rather than driving their own cars, whose out-of-state license plates were sure to arouse the ire of the more violent townspeople. And above all, white volunteers should avoid being alone with black colleagues.
As the hours passed without problems, Doar’s anxiety diminished enough for him finally to have dinner. An apple he’d eaten earlier was the only food he’d consumed that day. As he and a colleague were dining at Montgomery’s Elite Café later that night, however, he received a disturbing telephone call. “It was the FBI,” Doar later told his associate when he returned to their table. “A Mrs. Liuzzo has been killed on the road back to Selma.”45
During her stay in Selma, Liuzzo had lived with a black family in public housing, feeding and caring for her hosts’ grandchildren, and most recently had assisted the medical team at St. Jude. But she had wanted to do more. She had offered to be a volunteer driver, even though Orange had told her specifically that her services were not needed: “Vi, don’t go out there,” Orange later recalled telling her. “We’ve got trucks, we’ve got busses; there’s no reason for you to use your car on that highway.” But Liuzzo ignored these warnings and joined Leroy Moton, a young member of SCLC, as they ferried marchers back and forth between Selma and Montgomery.46
According to the FBI and local police, Liuzzo and Moton had been driving in Lowndes County when they were ambushed. A car filled with unknown suspects had pulled alongside Liuzzo’s vehicle, spraying it with bullets. Liuzzo had been killed instantly, but Moton was miraculously unscathed, and he managed to return to Selma where state police and the FBI interrogated him. But he was a poor eyewitness. He could not identify the shooters or even recall the make or color of the car. It appeared that Liuzzo’s killers would go unpunished.
Then suddenly, at 12:42 p.m. the following afternoon, President Johnson appeared on national television to announce that Liuzzo’s killers had been identified and were in custody. The four suspects were members of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. “Mrs. Liuzzo went to Alabama to serve the struggle for justice,” Johnson said, before continuing with obvious revulsion. “She was murdered by the enemies of justice who, for decades, have used the rope and the gun, the tar and the feathers, to terrorize their neighbors. They struck by night, as they generally do. For their purposes cannot stand the light of day.”
Flanked by J. Edgar Hoover and Nicholas Katzenbach, the president also told the nation that he had ordered the attorney general to create new legislation to combat the Klan and that he also encouraged Congress to investigate it and other violent organizations. Johnson’s interest in the case was remarkable; he had first learned of the shooting not long after it had occurred on Thursday night and called the FBI several times before going to sleep at 1:00 a.m. and rising at six the next morning. It was not customary for the president to act as America’s top cop, but the tragedy of Liuzzo’s death and the general fears about violence during the march—as well as, perhaps, the fact that Liuzzo was a white woman—help to explain Johnson’s interest in the case.47
Johnson’s statement was not completely true. One of the accused, thirty-five-year-old Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., was not in jail. He was helping the FBI build a case against the Klansmen, for Rowe had been the FBI’s top informant inside the Alabama Klan for the past five years. According to Rowe, it was fellow Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins, a mechanic, who had fired the shots that killed Liuzzo. Rowe himself claimed that he had stuck his gun out the window and had only pretended to shoot. The FBI believed Rowe’s explanation and decided not to test his gun or bullet casings for fingerprints that might have cast doubt on his story.
It later emerged that the FBI had made a Faustian pact in order to get inside the KKK. Thanks to Rowe, the FBI arrested the suspects. In exchange for Rowe’s pledge to testify against them, the Justice Department gave him immunity from prosecution and promised him a new life in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Rowe’s activities in the Klan had been bloody and illegal: he had organized and participated in the attack on the Freedom Riders in Birmingham in 1961 and may have been involved in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. But the FBI was willing to overlook Rowe’s violent life in the hope that he would provide them with information necessary to destroy the Klan.48
To divert attention away from his informant—the press was starting to ask why Rowe had done nothing to prevent the shooting—Hoover created a more alluring subject for media attention. He and his men worked quickly to transform Viola Liuzzo, mother of five and part-time college student, into a blond seductress who came south not to fight for civil rights but instead to sleep with black men. Hoover told Johnson that Liuzzo’s body had exhibited “numerous needle points indicating that she may have been taking dope.” The Klansmen went after her, Hoover said, because they saw “this colored man . . . snuggling up pretty close to the white woman . . . it had all the appearances of a necking party.”49
None of this was true, but Hoover’s files eventually wound up in Klan literature. The killers’ attorneys distributed the hate-filled pamphlets to reporters and made Liuzzo’s character a major issue when their clients came to trial. Matthew Hobson Murphy, the Klan’s Imperial Klonsul, called Liuzzo a “fat slob with crud that looked like rust all over her body [and] she was braless.” She was not “the mother of five lovely children and a community worker,” Hobson railed, but rather a “nigger lover” lusting after “black meat.” It was perhaps no surprise when the four men were each acquitted by all-white Alabama juries. But in a federal courtroom in December 1965, with Judge Frank M. Johnson presiding and Assistant Attorney General John Doar prosecuting, they were convicted of violating Mrs. Liuzzo’s civil rights, and each was sentenced to ten years in prison. Rowe was the prosecution’s star witness, and in recognition of his services, the FBI gave him a $10,000 reward, a new identity, and an appointment as a deputy US marshal in San Diego, California.50
All this lay in the future. For now, however, the civil rights movement had another martyr whose sacrifice—though spat upon by many white southerners—weakened congressional opposition to the voting rights bill. Michigan governor George Romney declared March 29 and 30, 1965, to be days of statewide mourning for Viola Liuzzo, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King visited the Liuzzo family to pay their respects. Ministers throughout Detroit—both black and white—spoke of Liuzzo’s sacrifice in their Sunday sermons, and the NAACP held a memorial service that thousands attended.
On Tuesday, March 30, as a gentle snow fell, Viola Liuzzo was laid to rest at the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery. King’s great march, which had its origins in the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, had ended as it began: with the spilling of blood.51
THE SELMA-TO-MONTGOMERY MARCH HAD ITS CRITICS, HOWEVER, AND NOT all were irate southerners. Former president Harry S. Truman, who had urged Congress to adopt a civil rights program seventeen years earlier, called the march “silly.” Responding to a reporter’s question, Truman went further: “They can’t accomplish a darned thing. All they want is to attract attention.” Renata Adler, a perceptive journalist who covered the march for the New Yorker, wondered what the march’s purpose was. Judge Johnson’s order, she argued, “had made the march itself ceremonial—almost redundant. The immediate aims of the abortive earlier marches had been realized: the national conscience had been aroused and federal intervention had been secured. It was unclear what such a demonstration could hope to achieve. Few segregationists could be converted by it, the national commitment to civil rights would hardly be increased by it, there was certainly an element of danger in it.”52
King himself was forced to defend the event. When the reverend appeared on Meet the Press, moderator Lawrence E. Spivak asked King to comment on Truman’s remark. “The march was not silly at all,” King replied. If not silly, Spivak pressed, then perhaps it was unnecessary, at least in terms of obtaining a voting rights act. “Wouldn’t you have gotten it whether or not you marched?” King dissembled: he did not want to antagonize Congress by suggesting that his efforts alone were responsible for the creation of the Act. Although the march had grown out of the voting rights campaign, he argued, it had also been intended to educate the country about Alabama’s untold bombings of homes and churches. “We are marching to protest . . . these murders . . . as much as the right to vote.” The other reporters on the panel that day showed little sympathy for King and his movement. They believed that King’s work was finished and that his primary goals had been achieved; they thought there was no need for further demonstrations.
King could not have disagreed more. There was still so much to do, not the least of which was promoting the passage of the Voting Rights Bill. JFK’s Civil Rights Bill, adopted by Johnson, had languished for a year, as it was derailed by the longest filibuster in American history, before Congress finally approved it in the summer of 1964. The same fate, King feared, might await the Voting Rights Bill.53
