March 10–12, 1965
JAMES Reeb’s name commanded national headlines on Wednesday morning, March 10. Details of the dramatic ambush—how the three ministers took a wrong turn in the dark past a reputed Klan hangout called the Silver Moon diner—eclipsed brooding controversies about the abbreviated march, and fresh cascades of emotion swelled the reaction to Sunday’s televised violence. Of the many newcomers who filed into Brown Chapel that morning, one Catholic philosopher from Missouri’s Fontbonne College was mystified to behold in the pulpit “a squat figure in blue jeans and a bizarre beanie,” then guessed from the ensuing shower of parables and entertainment that “one of Martin Luther King’s most articulate spokesmen” must be concealing himself in an outfit of “local color.” James Bevel coached the crowd to sort through every proposed action for constructive purpose. “We are testifying,” he said. “Remember that. Some people have a hard time understanding nonviolence.” Bevel claimed an immense untapped power for the doctrine to break down barriers when people willing to suffer worked hard to frame questions of justice unambiguously. “If nonviolence can work in Alabama,” he declared, “it can work in South Africa.”
At 12:47 P.M., Rev. L. L. Anderson led the crowd of five hundred outside to a roadblock under a chinaberry tree less than a block down Sylvan Street, where Mayor Joseph Smitherman, backed by a line of policemen, declared a permanent blockade. “You can make all the statements you want,” added Public Safety Director Wilson Baker, “but you are not going to march.” Behind Baker, flanked by deputies and possemen, Sheriff Clark wore a white helmet and his trademark button pledging “Never” to abandon segregation. Behind them formed a loose reserve of one hundred Alabama troopers.
Thus began a marathon standoff. Sister Antona, a Negro nun from St. Louis, was the first to take a bullhorn to deliver a simple statement about why she had made the journey. One by one, more than thirty speakers stepped forward for nearly two hours—a rabbi from New Jersey, a student from Yale, a priest from Minnesota. At four o’clock, when members of an ecumenical delegation headed home to Missouri in two chartered airplanes, they were such an instant phenomenon that the powerful St. Louis radio station KMOX put Sister Antona and five other “nuns of Selma” directly on the air with stories that drew a flood of more than twenty thousand phone calls. Listeners from forty states variously praised them as national saviors and denounced them for perverting their image of a nun’s cloistered purity. In Selma, Ralph Abernathy announced at dusk that the stymied marchers would keep vigil all night for the comatose James Reeb. Jesse Jackson, having arrived from Chicago in the van packed with divinity students, moved briskly among leaders of the weary veterans and new reinforcements, asking, “What do you want my people to do?” Wilson Baker strung a clothesline across Sylvan Street to mark a boundary line, and Selma teenagers swiftly improvised verses to the tune of “The Battle of Jericho”: “We got a rope that’s a Berlin Wall, Berlin Wall…in Selma, Alabama…. We’re gonna stand here ’til it falls…. Hate is the thing that built the wall…. Love is the thing that will make it fall…” Headlights from the state troopers’ idling cruisers silhouetted them behind the long clothesline.
The pilot of a commercial flight radioed ahead for a Birmingham taxi to meet his airplane on the runway so as to spare Marie Reeb the ordeal of pushing through photographers at the terminal. Hospital escorts took her promptly to the surgical recovery room where her husband lay in the midst of life support machines with a tracheotomy tube in his throat. By evening, with the help of friends, she managed to compose herself to speak briefly with reporters arranged in three tiers around the hospital auditorium. They had agreed to minimize her stress by submitting seven questions in advance through ABC correspondent Edgar Needham, ending with the most difficult. “I told the children this morning as soon as they woke up that their father had been hurt,” she replied. “The younger ones did not fully understand, but the thirteen-year-old was quite upset.” Retreating to wait in a reserved space near the recovery room, she found a bouquet of yellow roses with a note of condolence from President and Mrs. Johnson.
The President, back in Washington from a day trip to Camp David, called Attorney General Katzenbach later Wednesday night. “This minister’s gonna die, isn’t he?” asked Johnson.
“Yes, sir,” said Katzenbach.
“Is he already dead?” asked Johnson.
When Katzenbach said it was a matter of hours, Johnson pushed for specific actions the administration could take to meet another crescendo of unrest. Katzenbach, having apologized profusely for recommending that the President make no public statement about Bloody Sunday until a legislative proposal was ready (“Forget it,” Johnson told him), presented measures that were not quite ready. That day’s draft of a voting rights message was unsatisfactory. “It just doesn’t sing yet,” Katzenbach said. He was consulting privately with Judge Frank Johnson (“I think the judge is going to be pretty good”), but could not say so. His feverish negotiations toward a voting rights bill with Senator Everett Dirksen, who again controlled the critical Republican swing vote, had irritated Senator Mike Mansfield to the point that the Democratic Majority Leader threatened revolt over being taken for granted. “He’s too polite to say that,” Katzenbach reported, “but that’s what he felt.” As to law enforcement, the Attorney General said he was eager to press federal charges for Sunday’s violence against Alabama officials, including Sheriff Clark (“I’m a little more reluctant with Lingo because it touches the governor”), but the Department was struggling to identify specific defendants from FBI evidence. “I just sent seven more lawyers down there,” he reported. Johnson spurred Katzenbach forward on all these options, and resolved to “take the cork out of the bottle” by confiding his plans to civil rights groups and religious leaders in the Oval Office, before their protests could escalate. “I don’t mind meeting with them,” he said. Katzenbach believed the somber reality of Reeb’s impending death could help “keep the rowdies down.”
WILDCAT REBELLIONS already were defying such hopes in Montgomery, where a supervised field trip shifted within hours into what the press called a “pee-in” outside the Alabama state capitol. Earlier on Wednesday, a convoy of cars and chartered buses arrived bearing seven hundred student members of the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League, with faculty chaperones and bag lunches packed by university cafeteria workers. Governor Wallace refused to see their representatives or receive their carefully drawn petition for Negro voting rights, which came as a shock to the delegation. The rebuff convinced one student leader that Tuskegee students were “no different from other black people—the country people, the people of Selma, anywhere.” Indignant speeches at the outdoor rally developed into a free-form debate about their condition, punctuated by clashes with the constricting rings of police and state troopers who pushed them back and forth between their respective jurisdictions at the foot of the capitol property. Against the pleas of the highly agitated dean of students, James Forman and other circulating SNCC leaders convinced about two hundred students to stage a sit-down strike for the governor’s attention. Some hand-holding couples wrenched apart over the sudden option to extend a college day-trip into uncharted insurrection. The majority who returned as scheduled with the dean put the Tuskegee campus into an upheaval, and the dwindling number who held their ground into the night, prevented from returning if they left, eventually broke through inhibitions to relieve themselves where they stood—female students squatting within clusters of friends faced outward. They sought shelter from rain after midnight by breaking into the nearby First Baptist Church—Ralph Abernathy’s old “Brick-a-day” church, built by ex-slaves, where the Freedom Riders of 1961 had been besieged. Forman resolved Thursday morning to “radicalize” the Alabama movement from a new SNCC base in Montgomery, animated by what the New York Times reported as “open contempt” for King’s conduct in Selma.
Eight blocks away, in a federal courtroom swamped with reporters, King testified as the first witness in Judge Frank Johnson’s hearing on the proposed march to Montgomery. Lawyers for Governor Wallace and Sheriff Clark made him admit that he marched on Tuesday in spite of Judge Johnson’s injunction, “even after a marshal read you the order.” When they pressed him to acknowledge that he had denounced the order as “unjust,” King shifted uneasily. “Yes, I did,” he said. The judge interrupted the lawyers to claim the fight as his own, ruling that guilt for contempt was a matter “between this court and the alleged contemptors.” Removing his glasses, he stared down from the bench to question King directly about his conversations with Governor Collins and how far he had marched beyond Pettus Bridge. Most pointedly, he asked King about a “report I have received from the Justice Department” that after the march was confronted by troopers, “they were pulled away and that their automobiles were removed while y’all were still there, is that correct?”
“That is correct,” said King.
“And then did you go forward, or did you turn and go back?” asked Judge Johnson.
“We turned around and went back to Selma,” said King.
“After the troopers had pulled back?”
“That is correct,” said King.
“And at that point there were no troopers in front of you?”
“That is correct,” said King. Heads nodded in the courtroom. The contest turned on clashing interpretations of his behavior as compliance, defiance, or shame.
Judge Johnson sternly demanded silence from spectators and admonished both sides to maintain decorum through their badgering hostilities. To circumvent his orders requiring the use of courtesy titles such as “Dr.” and “Mr.,” lawyers for Alabama never referred to or addressed King by name.
IN WASHINGTON that same Thursday morning, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood rushed into President Johnson’s living quarters to inform him that twelve demonstrators had launched a sit-in downstairs. With security already heightened by the perpetual picket lines outside the gates, the alarm would be enough to generate two diagrams on the front page of the next day’s New York Times showing how the six young Negroes and six whites had accomplished the first recorded penetration of the White House, posing as tourists. The President sought advice from his aides Lee White, Bill Moyers, and Jack Valenti, as well as Youngblood—the agent who had covered him famously during the gunfire into the Dallas motorcade—then vetoed the standing procedure to eject the demonstrators by force. Instead, he ordered Youngblood to keep them sealed off in the East Wing corridor where they had ensconced themselves, and divert all foot traffic elsewhere. Not even Mrs. Johnson was allowed the peek she desired, but White House maids could serve coffee to advance nature’s encouragement for them to leave. With that, the President departed for the Cabinet Room to begin his civil rights audiences with a group of Negro newspaper publishers.
In Montgomery, before Judge Johnson recessed his hearing for the day, Willie Ricks reported to Atlanta over the SNCC WATS line that “Bevel and Forman almost came to blows in the church.” They were in Dexter Avenue Baptist, the prim little church at the foot of the capitol hill where King had been pastor during the bus boycott. Forman had led a tired remnant of the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League group there from First Baptist to join students newly recruited by Ricks from Alabama State, the local Negro college, along with some traveling students and clergy—mostly white—gathered up from the Montgomery airport on their way to Selma. Bevel barged in from Selma to challenge their clarity of purpose. “What did you set out to do?” he asked. He induced several people to say they were responding to publicity about Selma. “Then why are you here in Montgomery?” shouted Bevel. “Why don’t you go to Selma and find out what people see as the next logical step in a nonviolent campaign to win the vote?” He said their “foolishness” in Montgomery could undercut the national drama building from Selma with an image of angry Negroes who broke into their own churches and urinated in the street. Bevel sat down in the front row and heckled Forman’s efforts to refute him. Forman said Bevel was taking the same side as the hateful racists who had abused their right to demonstrate. “Demonstrate for what?” cried Bevel. He accused Forman of controlling the crowd by keeping it uninformed, which brought their dispute to a boil.
“I decided to stop trying to talk,” Forman later wrote of the moment. If he launched into “the whole history of King’s actions in Selma,” he knew Bevel would dismiss his grievances as rivalry in the guise of strategy. Instead, Forman announced that he was resuming the demonstration at the capitol by himself if necessary. “Anybody who wants to come with me can do so,” he said. Four SNCC staff members and one student followed him out the door. A cordon of Montgomery police officers manhandled Forman and dragged all five to jail. Shortly thereafter, officers fell upon the others as they tried to slip away to Selma—seizing Bevel and the first few students, driving the remaining two hundred back into the church with billy clubs that inflicted several wounds. Forman and Bevel wound up in neighboring cells, their differences swallowed up until they posted bail.
By late Thursday afternoon in Washington, only two of twelve demonstrators had voluntarily departed from their sit-in positions along the primary entry corridor at the White House. President Johnson, running out of time before fifty-odd members of Congress were due for the tenth briefing reception on Vietnam, gave Agent Youngblood and several aides detailed instructions for removing the intruders with minimum public notice. While he diverted the press with a brief stop elsewhere by motorcade, Johnson directed, they were to assemble integrated teams of police officers—not federal agents—to haul away the occupiers in small groups out of different gates to different precinct stations in unmarked cars. That being precisely done, the arriving legislators passed no jarring sights of disorder on their way into the White House, but sounds from the continuous picket line outside the gates did penetrate the walls of the East Room, where Johnson made prefacing remarks on the parallel crisis in Selma. “The ghost of Lincoln,” he said, “is moving up and down the corridors rather regularly these days.”
The President introduced the Attorney General to explain the judgment he had just rendered at a press conference initiated and scripted by Johnson—that state and local officials had used “totally unreasonable force” on Sunday. “I have no question that federal law was violated,” Katzenbach declared in the administration’s first substantive response to Pettus Bridge. “We are going to bring charges against those whom we can identify as violators.” This message drew a stinging cross-examination from several legislators, including Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi, who blasted Katzenbach for siding with Communist agitators to trample on the rights of the South. McNamara and Rusk were having an easier time explaining the administration’s war moves in Vietnam when an aide handed President Johnson a note that James Reeb had been pronounced dead at 6:55 P.M., Alabama time. “Lyndon and I excused ourselves for a helpless, painful talk with Mrs. Reeb,” recorded Lady Bird Johnson. The President insisted that a presidential C-140 airplane take the widow and Reeb’s father back home when they were ready, and he consoled them for fifteen long minutes about their personal loss for a just cause. “But what is there to say?” Mrs. Johnson added in her diary. “When we went upstairs we could hear the Congressional guests and the music still playing below; and out in the front the chanting of the Civil Rights marchers. What a house. What a life.”
WILSON BAKER, unshaven and haggard from lack of sleep, announced Reeb’s death Thursday night to several hundred Selma Negroes and visiting clergy still standing vigil at the “Berlin Wall” clothesline on Sylvan Street. Behind them, dripping from a second day of steady cold rain, a banner still hung above the Brown Chapel doorway from Jimmie Lee Jackson’s funeral on March 3: “Racism Killed Our Brother.” Prayers and song verses recognized Reeb as the second martyr of the Selma campaign until interrupted by another object hurled from the distance, which struck a demonstrator from Wisconsin in the forehead. Baker helped send him off to Good Samaritan for treatment, maintaining a rapport of gruff civility across his barrier even though he had prevented the demonstrators from building tent shelters—city code, he said—which left them and their patchwork bed of air mattresses soaked in the mud beneath umbrellas, blankets, and flattened cardboard boxes on sticks. (“I’m a segregationist,” Baker told one reporter, “but if I was a nigger I’d be doing just what they’re doing.”) He pledged solemnly to the crowd—as he had promised the Justice Department already—that he would file first-degree murder charges within an hour of Reeb’s death against the four Selma men he had identified as the assailants, one of whom had seventeen prior arrests. When he returned, the bandaged Wisconsin man was already back among demonstrators, who sang between their diversions of fatigue, such as street dances, grandiose debates about fasts to the death, and naps in the dry Brown Chapel pews.
Governor Collins rushed back to Selma that evening to buffer emotional eruptions from Reeb’s death—only to become disturbed himself by an encounter with Lola Bell Tate, a teenage girl he found on the floor of the Brown Chapel parsonage. Dr. Dinkins explained as he worked to stop the bleeding that a .22 caliber bullet had pierced her lip and knocked out a tooth, but luckily had been too spent to cause more damage. Tate was the third victim so far of potshots fired into the street vigil. Collins made his way back outside past the clothesline and Baker’s police officers to the commander of the state troopers, asking why he deployed his armed men to face inward with weapons trained on the demonstrators rather than upon the marauders who fired and hurled projectiles from the darkness behind. Receiving no satisfactory answer, Collins recovered his official neutrality and went off to seek a negotiated truce that would relax the vigil in return for a one-time memorial service for Reeb at the courthouse. He and his assistants discovered that tear gas grenades had been set off beneath their government sedan. “They attempted to drive it,” reported the New York Times, “but were forced to get out after half a block, their eyes watering.”
At FBI headquarters, officials maneuvered to minimize the bureau’s public exposure. When both the White House and Justice Department requested an FBI escort for Marie Reeb in Birmingham, Assistant Director DeLoach fended off the courtesy duty with an exaggerated claim that all Alabama agents were “working around the clock in the Selma area.” This earned him a personal commendation from J. Edgar Hoover, who mandated instead a security review of the Justice Department aide suspected to have originated the escort idea. Simultaneously, to forestall any “numbers game” about FBI performance, DeLoach dodged a request to disclose how many agents were assigned to Selma. There were enough to get results, he told White House press secretary George Reedy, but Katzenbach’s press conference late Thursday pitched the Bureau’s internal machinery into reverse alarm. Well into the night, headquarters grilled employees about how the Attorney General could promise federal prosecutions before the FBI provided “any information whatsoever…indicating that any of the police officers involved in the brutal beating of the marchers on Sunday March 7, 1965 had been identified.” Panicky agents “emphatically stated that they had no knowledge,” and parroted the accepted line that matching troopers or deputies with thousands of photographs “has been difficult due to the fact a large majority were wearing gas masks.” When supervisors wrung from the head of the Mobile office an admission that he had shared interim results with John Doar, and thus taken initiative for which “he has no written record of authorization,” the FBI’s disciplinary apparatus isolated and removed him by morning.
THE SEVERAL crises converged toward showdown on Friday, March 12. In Selma, where rain fell so hard that only eighty at a time maintained the vigil outdoors, the last of the Chicago theology students left for home—Jesse Jackson with a mild case of pneumonia—but newcomers replaced them several times over. Seventy Catholics arrived that day from Chicago alone, and the annual meeting of the Unitarian-Universalist Association adjourned en masse to Selma from Boston, where the symphony honored Reeb with the same piece it had played after the Kennedy assassination, Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits.”
Wilson Baker could not keep his agreement with Governor Collins to secure permission for a memorial service at the Selma courthouse, because his boss, Mayor Smitherman, moved steadily against him into a political alliance with Sheriff Clark, bending to local voters angered by the “appeasement” of Tuesday’s march. On his own, Baker did cut down the “Berlin Wall” with his pocketknife that afternoon. Although he emphasized that there still would be no marches, demonstrators eagerly cut up pieces of the clothesline as souvenirs of a symbol removed. They raised freedom chants along with prayers of conviction that nonviolence would overcome the barriers to Montgomery. The rain finally stopped. Young people invented new verses for their song: “The invisible wall is a Berlin Wall…. The troopers’ cars are a Berlin Wall…”
In Montgomery, a large truck pulled up outside temporary SNCC headquarters with a surprise delivery of tents, helmets, cooking utensils, and assorted survival equipment. Silas Norman berated Forman for spending many thousands of scarce SNCC dollars unilaterally toward a “grandstand” campaign that the organization had rejected a week earlier. SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers was stunned to learn that Forman had put out a “nationwide call” to Montgomery, mimicking King. Forman, in turn, was dismayed to learn that Stokely Carmichael and seventy Tuskegee recruits abandoned the occupation of Dexter Avenue Baptist as a foothold for demonstrations, under pressure from Bevel and church trustees who cut off the electricity and water. Meanwhile, at federal court in Montgomery, Assistant Attorney General John Doar was “plainly astonished,” according to the New York Times, to hear his own FBI witness blurt out—against the grain of his testimony, and without being asked—that Alabama troopers were “justified in using tear gas” on Bloody Sunday. Unbeknownst to Doar or spectators, rookie agent James M. Barko had misinterpreted the Bureau’s overnight dragnet about helping Doar, and soon felt corrective discipline straight from Hoover’s office for putting the FBI on any side of public controversy about race. Doar, arguing in support of King’s petition for a protected march, tried to recover by offering into evidence a three-minute news film of the violence on Pettus Bridge, and Judge Johnson, visibly affected by footage he had never seen, called a recess as soon as courtroom lights were restored. His demeanor confirmed instincts within Governor Wallace’s inner circle that the judge and the whole country were tilting against them. “The niggers are like cats,” one legislator told a reporter. “They always land on their feet.” Late Friday, yearning to regain public initiative, Wallace wired President Johnson for an appointment to address “some of the greatest internal problems ever faced by this nation.”
Undercover agents scattered through the outdoor lines for the White House tour on Friday to prevent a recurrence of the previous day’s sit-in. For better than four hours, through lunch, President Johnson sat in the Cabinet Room flanked by Katzenbach and Vice President Humphrey, listening to stories about voting rights from more than three dozen men—a few young activists* and a delegation of clergy from a mammoth ecumenical assembly convened by the Commission on Religion and Race. Many had been to Selma, including Rev. Joseph Ellwanger of the white Alabamian’s march and Rev. Robert Spike from the “turnaround” march on Tuesday. The President took notes. His joke fell flat when he remarked that the picket lines outside were “violatin’ my civil rights” by keeping his daughters from doing their homework, and the audience grew restless when Humphrey recited all the past achievements for which Johnson deserved credit. “Why has it taken so long for you to send a voting rights bill to Congress?” Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore asked bluntly. Stung, Johnson said it was not easy to fashion a constitutional bill that would pass a Congress dominated by hostile Southern committee chairmen, and also deliver the franchise effectively to five million Negroes where all previous measures had failed. When Spike and his delegation returned to the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill, where the CORR’s nationwide convocation of three thousand clergy itself made front-page news, their reports of impatience with Johnson drew cheers, but descriptions of an “anguished” President received skeptical comments about an LBJ “snow job.”
Back in the Oval Office, Johnson called for his dog Blanco but found him sick from a rabies shot. To stimulate interest in an upbeat topic, he took Laurence Rockefeller of the White House Conference on Natural Beauty down to the press room—only to find that nearly all the reporters had rushed outside to watch officers haul away two dozen demonstrators who had been rooted out of the tour line but now sat in Pennsylvania Avenue during rush hour, plus a handful of white women who had slipped through the northwest gate to lie facedown on the White House driveway. Johnson told the remaining journalists they could ask Rockefeller anything they wanted, but got few takers. When one of them mentioned that Governor Wallace reportedly was asking to see him, Johnson pounced. Even before the telegram from Alabama was received, his staff arranged and announced a summit conference for the next morning.